


Valley of the Shadow, Act I

by nightfall rising (potionpen), potionpen



Series: Subjectiverse (the truth is what i see it is) [9]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: CONSTANT VIGILANCE!, Civil War, Divided Loyalties?, Drama & Romance, Families of Choice, Getting better all the time (and you're starting to scare me), Harry Potter was an unreliable narrator, I know you are but what am I (no really: what?), Love and war (don't care what's fair), Mind tricks and spy games, Multi, Occlumency, Prequel, Read me like one of your Slytherin girls, Riddle War I, Self-Esteem Issues, Slow Build, Slytherins Being Slytherins, Slytherins are people too (but so are Gryffs), Tom is creeptastic, Tug of war tightrope-walking, Women Being Awesome, corkscrews and battering rams, read your chocolate frog cards, spackle, sunshine & roses: thorn-punctured sunburn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-12
Updated: 2015-07-06
Packaged: 2018-01-04 11:37:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 72
Words: 294,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1080566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potionpen/pseuds/nightfall%20rising, https://archiveofourown.org/users/potionpen/pseuds/potionpen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gryffindor isn't what Slytherin sees in it, and the reverse is even more true. The Potters don't know they look different depending on where you're standing, the Blacks know precisely how they come across and like it that way, and Severus Snape isn't quite who anyone thinks he is—least of all himself.</p><p>Britain, Spring of 1980. No one cares what's fair when their people are on the line, and truth would be subjective even if everyone told it.  Brute-force bloody battles are how Gryffs (and Lestranges) think; when a sane Slytherin wants power it's all smoke and smiles, masks and mirrors.  Roll up your sleeves, slip into your cloak, and slap that dagger on your belt. This is war, people—pick a side! </p><p>...What the hell. Pick three.</p><p>Ch. 1: Hogwarts has a history, Narcissa has a party, Rodolphus shares a fun craft activity with a friend, and Severus is left with <s>the body</s> a bit of a dilemma.  He thinks all the mysteries he's read will help him.<br/>Aha. Ha. Ha.<br/>...</p><p>Ch. 72: July 31, 11:45 pm:<br/>Potter vs Snape, round 993,234,546,878. Snape vs Potter, round 1.</p><p> </p><p>  <b>Love this fic, hate it, or be totally confused: I solemnly swear that this is not a ride you've been on before.</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. London (Preamble)

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer** : Profitless fanwork
> 
>  **Warnings** : by chapter.
> 
>  **Notes** are, uh, extensive. Because this is going to be long. Don't want to overwhelm. They'll be at the end of chapter one if you start wondering about discrepancies with things Harry thinks he knows because people told him stuff ( _hahahahahahahaha_ ) and so on.
> 
> So **welcome aboard.**  
>  In the right place? Keys, wallet, phone? Cloak, dagger, wand? Know what side you're on? Good catch, quite right, trick question. Let's roll.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** for language (by which I will usually mean 'bad' when I don't mean 'bad puns') and Severus-brain. Which, as pointed out previously, is dry-yet-supersaturated, convoluted, parenthetical, and has a chip on its shoulder the size of Hogwarts.

**Valley of the Shadow**  
_by nightfall  
  
(Potionpen mostly, these days, but I still like saying 'by nightfall,' sue me.  Please don't, I have nothing.  Did I mention this is profitless fanwork?  So, so profitless.  Such a fan, JK, we only rip it to shreds out of love.... _

* * *

 

**Preamble**

There wasn't much time between the Halloween sky falling and being swallowed by the grey to work out which halfhearted flutters of chaos-butterfly wings had shattered the world. It was enough for Sirius to realize that Pete must have been feeling like a fifth wheel for years, although not enough to learn to take any blame.

It took longer for Severus, who didn't wait a nanosecond to start the debate on whether it would be most useful and more of a penance to kill himself or go on teaching, to decide it had probably begun with the Thing With The Ducks (Of Which We Do Not Speak). Of course, he had rather more on his calendar.

London

The ducks had happened before even the first of the series of war-related tragedies that had really hit home for either of them. Back then, the war had still been mostly underground, and in comparison to what it became later it had felt like a game. Back then, Severus's old Housemates had still only been killing and tormenting people they didn't see as people, and only a few of them.

Even then he hadn't been thrilled about it, not by a long road. Unfortunately, his position was, as he saw it, caught in the undertow, heading for a tall waterfall, with quicksand on one bank and crocodiles on the other. After his years at school, he'd found very little to choose between Duly Constituted Authority and the Death Eaters, and the scant years since graduation hadn't changed his mind.

Didn't both sides have their bullies, their torturers of prisoners? Didn't both sides do unforgivable things? Didn't they both think a particular culture, whether it was the muggle or the Slytherin one, made everyone who was tainted by it inhuman and unworthy of consideration, acceptance, and the protection of justice and equitably enforced law? Didn't they both operate on stupid, short-sighted, narrow-minded, change-phobic, wizard-centric, self-righteous sets of assumptions and values that didn't hold up well in the face of real life?

That being the case (and he went on believing it had been the case until he died, as nothing ever persuaded him otherwise), he reasoned then that the crocodiles didn't live where he slept, whereas the quicksand wasn't actually slavering for his blood. In that case: cautiously experiment with snowshoes.

No matter how disgusted he got, or how afraid, it never once occurred to him to leave the country. But then, he never claimed to be undamaged enough to qualify for sanity. Except out loud to other people. Which totally didn't count.

It wasn't the only thing he lied about, although it was probably the only lie he put into words that worked even a little bit. Years and years of careful groundwork had left most of his fellow Slytherin alums looking down at him indulgently, as a more useful than usual mascot. He was clever but naïve, scrappy but squeamish. Proud for his station, but knew his place and didn't fight it.

He could be trusted to behave appropriately at social gatherings, if you exercised common sense about the other guests, but had absolutely no desire to have to do so. His blood was at once impossible and impeccable. In the Slytherin view, it made what in another would have been social climbing a still-distasteful but natural and nearly mandatory attempt to gain back the standing his mother had thrown away. Still, he left no one under any misapprehension that he wanted anything more than to be self-sufficient, helpful when he could be, and left-the-fuck-alone with his books and cauldrons.

If it wasn't the ideal position for someone who wanted nothing to do with the violence and the politics and had too many allies who wanted everything to do with both, it was (he thought) the only survivable one. The problem with it was that so many of the people who felt reasonably friendly to him because of it were, when you got right down to it, monsters.

For example: Bellatrix's lumbering psychopath of a husband and his ideas about cool craft activities to share with friends. You couldn't shoot him down because he'd get huffy and break your arm, and you also couldn't shoot him down because of his goddamn excited-puppy eyes anyway, you pushover.

So you ended up a year and a half later shattered into dust in a blast-blackened house, kneeling on your demented boss's ashes with the glorious coppery hair of your first friend's corpse spilled out all over the floor instead of blood. With her _kid_ looking down at you from the crib with her eyes, sodding _burbling_ at the pretty light show, not even the sense to know the world had ended, as sociopathic and above human feeling as his surely-damned father.

…Yeah, okay, so those dots could probably use some connecting.

* * *

**Chapter notes** : Yes, Severus's read on Harry's noises there was completely wrong. Whimpering ≠ burbling. That's not 'lack of familiarity with baby noises,' that's 'Severus was not fully-and-correctly processing anything but Dead Lily.' What can I say, he and Harry always get each other wrong. I suspect Horcrux/Dark Mark static on the radar (kidding! ...mostly).

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Style and pace** : War coverage, yes. Nonetheless, this fic is an exploration, not a gory plunge or thriller. It's in no hurry. Really at all. Also, the first handful of chapters aren't typical. To make an informed decision about whether this story's for you, I'd say give it at least till chapter six. You wouldn't leave without at least greeting His Dark Lordship, would you? It's safe enough; he's still sane... ish...
> 
>  **Warning-related** : Warnings are by chapter, and on the very rare occasion that something really terrible happens to anyone I'll help the squeamish skip the worst of it. I'm squeamish myself (although you may not believe me in a minute...)
> 
> You shouldn't need the prequels (see the POV sections) to understand what's happening, but they're where the relationships developed. I.e: at Hogwarts. If you have, please be patient with the flashbacky exposition: it's there so newcomers don't absolutely have to read 163 pages of kidfic and heart-eyes to not be completely confused about the central relationships.
> 
> This is a love-and-war story. There's a ['gen' version on ffnet](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9920703/1/Valley-of-the-Shadow-gen) where the Severus love is platonic (canon relationships still exist, and there may be other pairings or UST implied). I'm sorry to have to admit that neither version will get graphic, but I've been told the non-gen version, at least, ought to come with a 'feels' warning on some chapters. It should be noted that 'platonic' excludes lust and sex but not emotional or even physical intimacy. Nothing will be sprung on you without explanation/backstory (as touched on above).
> 
> In 2015 I don't think it should still be necessary to have to warn for the gender-makeup of couples. There are at least references to relationships in all gender-iterations, canonical and otherwise, and sex-change magic exists. I won't mess around with canon relationships, but it shouldn't be assumed that any other relationship (or any character) will or won't make it to the end of the fic unless Harry has certain knowledge about it.
> 
> That was a big ol' _I'm not warning you one way or another about character deaths there_ , in case anyone missed it.
> 
> I will warn you there's way more pregnancy than the author is entirely comfortable with. 1980-fic, can't be avoided. All the mothers are straight-up female, though. Straight, too, actually, unless there's something Frank Longbottom doesn't feel is anyone's business. Lucius and James are uncomplicatedly male, at least in this fic, but if you want to read Frank in a different way it's OK by me. ^.^
> 
>  **Canon Compliance** :  
> It is advised that the reader be familiar with the biography of Harry Potter written by Ms. Rowling. The reader should be aware that this seven-volume series was fact-checked by Ms. Skeeter rather than Miss Granger, and cannot be relied on in the matter of dates. Furthermore, Ms. Rowling's books are written from the point of view of the subject, and not only contain a distinctly pro-Gryffindor bias but largely confine themselves to what Mr. Potter saw, heard, assumed, and speculated.
> 
> In other words, THIS IS A SLYTHERIN STORY. Truth is subjective, there is no whole truth, there is no one truth, and people lie. The Riddle wars are well-named.
> 
> (Also, the information in PS/SS: The Boy Who Lived doesn't mix well with the rest of the series once we get away from Vernon Dursley's POV. No one who was there for the next few pages would have talked to Rita, either. I'm assuming she pulled the bits before Hagrid got there out of her... antennae.)
> 
>  **POV and House bias**  
>  _A Key Called Promise_ and _The Wicket Gate_ are really one story, separated mainly for rating reasons. _River of the Water of Life_ and _Valley of the Shadow_ are that story's sequels. Being written entirely from the POV of a Slytherin Severus-ally, Key and WIcket had a strong anti-Gryffindor bias. _Valley does not_.
> 
> To be clear from the beginning: that was the POV character's bias, not necessarily mine. There are multiple narrators in this story, and they will all see themselves and each other in their own way. JKR set up canon so that it would be OOC for the characters not to hate on each other. That's one thing. But when a _story_ character-bashes, that's... slapstick. Can be fun, but not what I'm doing and not really interesting. My actual position will always be 'X did Y thing here, I think I can see why, that's going to have consequences,' rather than 'X is Z kind of person!"
> 
> And if it isn't... it was the goal.
> 
>  **Questions/comments/encouragement** :  
> Yes, please(please please please please). Getting encouragement and talking about the story/world/characters stimulate the writing. Posting into a void is discouraging, and not something I'm interested in.


	2. MAY 1980: Stonehenge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hogwarts: A History. Lestrange: a psycho. Severus: a very screwed bunny.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings** for history, Snape-brain, and, as stated, Death-Eaterly ideas of cool craft projects to share with friends (ie: horror, or at least very sad ewwwww)

 

** Valley of the Shadow:  
**

**Book I:  
**

**MAY, 1980**

How can you pinpoint when something began?

The case could be made that the Riddle wars started when old Fergus Mountjoy died and the self-styled 'Lord Voldemort' took over leadership of the Knights of Walpurgis, scoring himself some legitimacy with the old blood. Or when those who followed Albus Dumbledore's lead closed ranks in the Ministry and made their policy of keeping Riddle's cronies out of power a little too obvious, made him choose between giving up and thinking outside the box.

You could say they started when a girl in a school loo died of snakesight, or when a boy found a restricted book in a school library. Horace Slughorn blamed himself forever, but what Tom got from him wasn't detail, only confirmation. He would have found it elsewhere, sooner or later, in the darker libraries of his Slytherin friends. And let's not forget, the boy had been effectively imperious long before his first wanded spell. _Tell the truth_ , O posterity: _I must not tell lies_.

Take the long view. Was it the bad mix of a frost-white heart, a grey orphanage, a conception black with the father's roofie-rape by potion, marred by obsession and false, forced love? But that horror had its roots in innocence, of a sort. The witch knew nothing but horror herself, knew only how to cringe and snatch. She had no way to know about sharing or giving, about having a self someone might fall in love with on their own.

Did her sad, terrifying, self-important ghoul of a father ever have a chance to learn a better way himself? How far back did that squalid madness go? Blame inbreeding, maybe, blame the pride of blood, the fear of change, fear cloaked in sneering over the alien outrage of cold iron and electricity laying open the ley lines like knives.

Or go historical. Blame Salazar Slytherin, for not wanting muggles' children at Hogwarts? As well to blame the Viking invasion, or maybe the Norman one (same saga, new verse). How long did it take to build a miracle like Hogwarts, even with magic and in an age of cathedrals? How long _do_ wizards live, and are we to take 'a thousand years ago' quite literally? Assume an era with a modicum of British literacy and maybe we blame Stephen and Matilda for letting loose a civil war on muggle England, for creating a generation whose parents lived together as enemies.

We don't need to. Hogwarts serves all Britain now, but did it always? Did Avalon teach the England of Romans and Druids, were the wizards of Eire called the Tuatha de Danaan, living and learning in their sidhe? It was rough above Hadrian's Wall for a long, long time, clan politics touchy enough on their own even before Church and British-royal squabbles bled north. What high-school teacher doesn't dream of keeping all the warring-gang kids out?  Suppose you had to let those Crips and Bloods, those Jets and Sharks, Hatfields and McCoys, Chattans and Kays sit in the same classroom, yours, with wands on their hips?

(Those this-is-your-new-family Houses seem like quite such a stupid idea now?)

Blame the diseases the plaguey, poxy, fleabitten muggles didn't know how to prevent, blame the young Church for lumping magic and all foreign gods in with the devil and healthful, sanitary cleanliness in with ungodly vanity. Blame the slow rebirth of literacy and international communication that complicated the secrecy of a private little world in a dark, dark age.

The printing press hadn't left China yet (would wizards have shared innovation internationally, those covert creatures?), and handwritten accounts are, for obvious reasons, rare. Books are fragile, and so are stories passed down in an oral tradition. A thousand years and the hurt echoes of broken friendships can change a man. They can turn an old man who valued family, clever enough to know a child come to the brilliance of magic was spoiled for the weary, grubbing muggle world for good, into a chilly, heartless snob. Easy as smothering spoiled meat with cinnamon or sandalwood to hide the color, taste, and slime—what, you don't do that anymore? Modern times, man, go figure.

Or come forward again, make the estimate conservative. Maybe the earliest the war could be said to have started, really, was when the thing who had been Tom Riddle scattered the shards of his soul and began to lose his mind. Maybe the attack on the Orkneys, or the disappearances? Or (let's be scrupulous), maybe a war hasn't begun until it's been declared. Call it begun with the first Dark Mark in the sky. No, call it the fifth, the tenth: the first few weren't authorized. Riddle appreciated his followers' pride, but while he was more or less compos mentis, their lack of discipline seriously pissed him off. He had _plans,_ fellas; no mavericks need apply. Or, you know, keep breathing.

For the skinny kid from the living-ghost town (you all know him, right, the one with the nose?), the war got really rolling at the 1980 Beltane fire. Taller than the manor house, fragrant and intoxicating with potion-soaked woods (which he had brewed himself, thank you and you're welcome, whose smoke he was not breathing in due to an apparently unique preference for uninterrupted sanity), its enchanted drumbeats pulsed ancient, potent magics into the earth, thrilling and drilling up through everyone's feet. It would have been a wonderful night, an exhilarating party, if only there hadn't been _people_ there.

Severus's flatmate had promised not to leave him alone, and hadn't. What he had done was to go a little overenthusiastic trying mixes of various other drinks with old Sluggy's infamous oak-matured mead, rendering himself completely useless as either a companion or social armor. Disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. Evan could go unconcernedly without excess for months, but only exercised actual self-control if he had an actual reason.

And he would pay dearly for it. Severus might go so far as to make him try to learn to fry eggs again. Or at least make coffee. By neutralizing himself he'd left Severus with the choice of eating and drinking things that had been lying on a table all night for anyone to play amusing pranks with (ahahahano), talking to people (ugh), or (shudder) dancing in public. Leaving before Narcissa yawned would have been very nearly suicidal.

At the time, he'd thought himself fortunate that it had been Rodolphus Lestrange who'd wandered over to his bit of shadow for a chat. Unquestionably one of the most dangerous when he wanted to be, Rus was, unlike many another Slytherin and particularly his wife, largely affable to people he didn't mean to kill.

More than that, as the one the Dark Lord usually turned to when he wanted some artifact or expert somewhere acquired for use, profit or study, he'd been all over the world. He could talk about interesting things for quite long periods before getting bored or turning the subject to hunting (of one sort or another. He didn't differentiate).

Unless a person is actually sneezed on, catching cold is usually a subtle affair. One can think back and remember someone was coughing, but it rarely registers until the incubation period is ending and that _coming down with something_ feeling starts. The moment a lethal disease comes in may be easier to pinpoint. They, thank whatever you thank, tend to need closer contact, more intimate exchanges, first or secondhand. They don't burn coming in either, though. It's still subtle. One doesn't immediately know. Did some collective consciousness shared by Wizarding Britain shift in unease? Severus didn't.

When he thought back, though, he did remember Rus getting all enthused over the difference between Mongolian and Viking treatments of the cups they'd made of their enemies skulls. And he remembered an unguarded (foolish!) question that had revealed his ignorant assumption that the cups were made from the lower parts of the skull (so as to stand up better, balancing on the teeth, he'd thought. Holes can be filled).

He did _not_ remember asking for a demonstration. He _knew_ he hadn't. It wasn't a thing he would have asked for. _He did not want one_. A week later, Rus was blithely hauling a corpse into his stillroom anyway.

She was a werewolf who had been a muggle just last month, and she was fourteen. He knew this because he'd chased her out of Belby's lab with the ink not dry on her Registry certificate and the charm on her portkey to the transforming chambers (cells) still smelling faintly of blackberries and burnt rubber.

Well, he'd had to get rid of her, hadn't he? The Wolfsbane potion had had, at that point, so many godawful side effects, some of which looked to be permanent, that it was completely unconscionable. He'd insinuated and fretted until Belby had ( _finally_ ) gotten the bright idea of ordering his apprentices to include 'possibly having a future' to the list of reasons to refuse a werewolf guinea-pig status. All a female one living in the muggle world would have had to do to survive and succeed was tell all her future employers she got debilitating cramps with clockwork regularity. Her romantic life would have been more complicated, but people had managed these things before.

There was a scorched hole where her heart should have been. So much for that, then.

He probably would have been hard put-to it not to throw up even if he'd never seen her before. Up until that point, he'd successfully avoided being confronted with that sort of thing in person. It hadn't even been difficult. The murder of muggles was indulged if one was careful not to get caught, but not encouraged, not then. Severus had seen dead people before, but only because his mother was (although her muggle flock would have laughed uneasily to hear the phrase) a village witch.

As it happened, though, he hadn't just seen her in passing. He knew she played the guitar and wanted to switch to bass because she and her friends were going to start a band as soon as they could agree on a sound. He knew she had a bit of a pash for the friend who meant to be their lead singer, and had had to drench her in his most withering sarcasms to dissuade her from telling this doubtlessly reliable person about her curse. He knew she was more worried that the transformations would bring on arthritis in her fingers than about any of the ways it was actually likely to destroy her life. It was the kind of denial he could respect.

He knew her da called her his little songbird when he was proud and Popkin when he wanted to embarrass her in front of her friends, because the man had done both right in front of him. He knew her damned blood pressure, and that she got chattier the more nervous she was, and more inclined to drop her aitches. That anxious motormouth was why he knew most of the rest of it; all he'd actually _asked_ was whether she knew what she was going to do with her life. He'd expected a yes or no, and gotten a five-minute lecture on Rush and Deep Purple (but no new information. He hadn't let that show on his face: Ranjit Patil had been prepping the abalone ten feet away, and Pat had no discretion).

She gotten a topical potion for her joints and a potable potion against the pain and the scarring. Then he'd told her to write his mother when she needed more (Mam could always use business, especially in muggle currency, and if it came by postman it wouldn't even get her in trouble), and kicked her out of his clinic.

He'd controlled himself with the other Death Eater, though—what a name, but that's wizards for you. Names give shape, so you call things what you mean them to become. Of course, it doesn't always turn out as you intended. Take Regulus Arcturus. A bit of a feline twist to him, but not exactly the panthery sort. If his parents had wanted him fierce, maybe they shouldn't have put a RABbit in his name. If they'd wanted him safe and sensible, giving him King Arthur's name might have been a mistake, even if it did flatter his grandfather, even if they'd meant him to be a rugged bear.

Or take his brother (please), Sirius Orion. A person who took life less soberly you could not hope to meet. His parents might have wanted a grim watchdog over the bloodlines of their noble house, hunting down their enemies. What they got was a brave and bright-eyed puppy who wanted nothing better from life but to play with his friends and chase birds and squirrelly snakes, more than a bit of both an SOB and a sob-story before he was done.

Yes, Severus (adj.: , strict, harsh, unadorned, intense, 2. demanding great ability, skill, or resilience. A name for emperors and saints, not milltown schoolteachers, and it hadn't softened the old bastard on a half-blood grandson one jot.  Severus Octavian, that unprepossessing child who grew into exactly what his nation needed at the time.  Born to Janus but a MayDay child all the same, who could have used more help than he ever accepted and was more than anyone ever wanted. Ta, Mam) had controlled himself with Rodolphus (the famous wolf: an operatic name), stuffing himself into himself until he didn't feel a single damned (or damning) thing but cool interest as Rus opened her head up on his workbench. With a bone-saw, because liking to work with their hands was something he and Lestrange had in common.

The episode would have wrecked him even if that had been the end of it, but Rus had claimed that since he was doing Severus a favor, Severus could jolly well clean up. And then he'd faffed off. When Severus thought about it later, he was fairly sure the world wouldn't have ended if Rus had done his own damned corpse-disposal.

 _And_ if nothing else had done the same butterfly-flapping work, _or_ if Severus hadn't (let's not call a spade a short-handled soil-transporting implement) panicked and gotten clever instead of re-growing her skull and dumping the body near her school.

That was the problem with him, he thought, no matter what other people said it was. His problem was that he didn't react to panic like normal people. If he wasn't too angry in the hot style at the same time to have proper thoughts at all, he _would_ try to think his way out of trouble. It never, ever, _ever_ worked out well for him.

Which wasn't to say that when he got clever he wasn't genuinely clever. Rather, he felt obscurely, he was in the grip of some bias of destiny or the universe that either enjoyed his pain and humiliation or wanted something specific to come of his life that wasn't at all what he himself intended. Things had gotten better since he'd left school, but his life had left him inclined to think the former.

When Lestrange had whistled his way off, Severus kept himself on ice. He hadn't expected to need instant access to tranquilizers since school, and the best one that didn't turn one's brain all fuzzy would take too long to make. The chilled-steel detachment of his mind as it was didn't let him delude himself that if he returned to himself without it he'd do anything but gibber, vomit, and possibly get drunk.

Not useful, and quite distasteful on all counts. Evan might get sloshed like a gentleman, happy and warm like everyone's dream of drunkenness, but he'd been born under generous stars. Severus wasn't afraid to have a drink with dinner, or even a few with friends. He never, _ever_ wanted to find out what kind of a drunk his father's son would be.

So he cast his stasis charms, sanitized everything he could without moving the body, and sat down to think.

Severus liked mysteries—not in real life, where they gave him the jitters, but on paper. Witty people moving themselves about in a living puzzle for you to figure out, and no one bothering _you_ because you were above it, watching and thinking and racing minds with the 'tec.

Puzzles. Puzzles, words, magic, and intimate access to intimate allies you were mutually fond with and could trust. The best things in the world, almost impossible to rank, and none really separate from the others. Food, most days, he could take or leave. Making People And Especially Kreacher Taste-Test Experiments was another matter. But then, experimenting fell under puzzles, and harmlessly tormenting one's friends under cementing the trust in fond alliances (also, fun).

And when it wasn't torment, when something _worked,_ when you won _that look_ and their eyes lit up—that was magic. That was Evan-magic, Lily-magic, Hogwarts-magic. The best kind, the kind he could only grope blindly for, scrabble at, the kind they breathed.

But puzzles, puzzles and words. Mystery novels—any novels—hadn't been easy to get his hands on until he'd graduated. Wizards didn't really do fiction, and Slytherins _really_ didn't. He hadn't dared be caught with muggle books at Hogwarts, and the grey stretch of purgatory his parents called home wasn't (O understatement) rich in bookshops or libraries. They hadn't had even one till he was fourteen. But he'd pored through enough of them to know in his bones that killing was to getting away with it what chopping veg for stew was to harvesting erumpent horn.

Not that anyone in Rus's cohort ever seemed to run into any difficulty about body disposal, and he'd seen more than enough to suspect they were well-practiced. However, he also knew, also in his bones, that he not only didn't have what gave them their luck but was never going to so much as recognize it if it licked his throat and proposed.

So he couldn't rely on whatever charmed, careless good fortune, divine favor, or bafflingly unavailable knowledge or talents saw them through. And he hadn't, damn it, had the foresight to start up a batch of Felix six months ago. He'd start on that the next time Evan went to a party or long dinner he could skip. Definitely. For now, though, he was going to have to be intelligent about it.

Right, then. What caught murderers up in the books? Initial stupidity or carelessness, or a failure to understand the law's hunters. He had confidence in those areas, so what else?

Letting themselves be associated with the victim or the crime scene. A small problem there, but not insurmountable. It was on record she'd visited the clinic, but the way Rus had killed her could have been done by a werewolf hunter. Severus and his lab-mates were the opposite of that. He could tell anyone, under veritaserum, that he'd sent her away because he'd wanted her to have the best chance in life her new species would allow her. A silly, harmless kid like her didn't need bone spurs, kidney stones, liver damage, personality changes, or the chance the silver allergy would mutate and start reacting to alloys. She could have had a life. He couldn't just say it under veritaserum, he could yell it, rant it, scream it. If he let himself think about it hard enough, he might very nearly cry.

Stop. Problem at hand.

What else? Interfering in the investigation. In one way or another, not trusting to their preparations and going back to make sure that everything was still all right.

Did he trust himself not to get nervous and blow up his own cauldron making that kind of a mistake?

Absolutely not. Severus was a walking raw nerve, when not making a conscious effort to get his mind right. He knew himself to be exactly the sort of overthinking control freak with a persecution complex to jump up in the middle of the night and run out to make sure he hadn't made any mistakes and nothing had been uncovered.

Given him, he'd probably step on Evan on his way out of bed, too, thereby creating a witness. And, if he once knew about it, Ev would fret, and he might talk to Narcissa. You could never tell, with Narcissa. She might think nothing of it and tell Evan he was precious but Severus was perfectly competent, or she might not. God forbid she worried to her husband. She might do. Since the wedding she'd gone a bit delusional about his solidity, reliability, and good sense.  Oxytocin, probably.  But if she did, instead of showing any of that, Luke would unquestionably go sneer at Bellatrix about _her_ husband being an overenthusiastic and undisciplined oaf, and she'd… no. Better not to even think about it.

Besides, Potter had a nasty habit of stalking Severus at odd hours. Which was not only irritating but idiotic. Severus was unique among his acquaintance in having a real job that not only had long hours but required enough concentration during them that failing to get enough sleep would be a real problem.

More, it was his association with the predators who _had_ free time that had given Potter the excuse to hate him out loud in the first place. Why didn't he go stalk Mulciber or Avery? Granted, stalking Severus was a lot safer than stalking Mulciber, but Avery would probably never even notice. Potter might even catch him doing something that would get him and his fists and wand and probably-by-now-disease-riddled unmentionables off the streets. If the idiot wanted to play cloak-and-dagger that badly… oh, well.

Anyway. Problem: clandestine movements would probably be noticed. Problem: Severus didn't trust himself to do what was needed and leave it at that forever, no nervous checking back. Solution: act openly in the sunlight and don't leave a crime scene to check.

New problem: how to not just hide a body but make it absolutely disappear?

A banishment? It would turn up somewhere else, and who knew what the Aurors could use these days to trace a body back to its banisher or its killer. He'd have to visit a volcano before he could send it into one, and stories suggested the ocean wasn't reliable, even with concrete and chickenwire, Logic suggested otherwise, but _never challenge Murphy's Law._

There were potions that would dissolve even bone, but their ingredients cost. Acquiring the ingredients would cause its own problems, and there would be the problem of, well, all those potions would survive her body, eating through things being what they did, and make more problems wherever they were used.

If he used a reducto, he'd be _breathing_ her. Not only that, but he'd be breathing her here, in the space that was most his own, most himself. Even though the chill he retched a little at that thought, although admittedly afterwards he very calmly made himself a pot of tea.

If he did it outside, _everyone_ would be breathing her. And (another crack in the ice, as quickly smoothed over) what if her curse hadn't died with her? That maniac Rookwood was trying to aerosolize the virus already, down in the bowels of the DoM, God and only-maybe the Dark Lord only knew why. _No_.

He thought about pulling some blood for comparison to a live sample, but he'd need the equipment at the lab to do it properly. And that automatically recorded all its findings.

Ripping efficiently through the indices of all his own books left him with no useful miracles, and asking for the use of anyone else's might Provide A Clue to anyone asking questions later.

Last option: make something eat her.

There were plenty of things that would eat a corpse, even a werewolf corpse. Even some that would take care of the skeleton as well. Few in England, though, and almost none outside the forest in Hogsmeade. Getting her to any of them would create more problems than just risking his own skin, which was in itself something to be considered. It wasn't as though he made a habit of visiting animals like that; he wasn't Hagrid. Nor was his preference for harvesting his own ingredients so strong that his past behavior would explain an international portkey now.

Solution? Feed her to something that _wouldn't_ eat a corpse.

It was that line of thought that brought him, half his usual height, carrying a rectangular plastic bag that just filled his pocket-sized arms, to the park. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit for the chickenwire gambit to Sir Pterry, of course.


	3. St. James

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter Pettigrew wishes, in retrospect, that his day had stayed tedious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** for worse horror. And language, including some that was PC at the time. I tried to argue him into being more polite, I don't know, it's probably not all that surprising really. I mean, seven years in a dorm trying to keep up with Sirius 'Look, Ma, I can be more outrageous than this!' Black.
> 
> Everything Chinese-language related, including the grammar, is indirectly credited to my favorite (and long-suffering) Mandarin teacher, who will remain anonymous so that he never finds out how his teachings are being perverted. 不客气, _-老师 [You're welcome, Mr. W].
> 
> This chapter is the one around which the story was written. It was originally a scene in an LJ game, the Hex Files, played out between myself and the inimitable **Katilara** , who's the only person ever who made me LIKE this guy, or see how a reasonably normal person could have ended up where he did. The canon version was, er, definitely never, um, yeah, ick (I can actually see that too, now, poor guy, good lord did he need an extraction). But bear with me here: not all dark forces are sorcerous.
> 
>  **If you're squeamish** , you may want to stop at 'not for people.' Or, if possible, skip to the last four or five paragraphs. I'll explain as delicately as possible in the endnotes if you don't want to risk it at all. I don't _suggest_ just skipping the chapter or even the end, because this is one of the characters I'd like you to meet from his own point of view. Before, well, this happens. Everyone looks different from the inside, is my point.

If Pete was thinking anything as he left the British Museum, it was how lucky he was to be able to get outside for a bit on a May afternoon that wasn't grey or grizzling.

It had been a long day. Some utter twat had enchanted the floor in front of a statue of Tiberius Claudius Nero. It had been confunding anyone standing on it to believe the old emperor was speaking to them—in whatever language they thought in, not Latin, and quite filthily.

He was inclined to suspect the Prewett twins. Thankfully, it wasn't his job to make that sort of determination or go after them. Even if the Old Man wouldn't have had something to say about Order members getting each other into trouble, he was just as pleased to leave facing their very inventive wands to someone else.

It was, however, his job to argue with the curator until he let Peter take the bit of floor up, and then to replace it. At once. It had taken _all day._ The Museum was warded tighter than ol' Snivvy's footlocker (fond memories!). Getting through the wards was no problem, but he wished he'd had Paddy or Remus about to get them set up again, and Jamie to fix the floor. Making it look right again had been incredibly tedious, especially with the curator looming over him and fussing.

He hoped it hadn't been the Prewetts. The trouble he'd get into for letting them reap their own sowing was almost as bad as the trouble he'd get into for Interfering With the Evidence-Gathering Process. Dumbledore had this way of _looking_ at you.

Yes, this had the potential to be a real problem, and Peter Pettigrew was not a man who liked problems in his life. Between his job and his friends, he had enough to deal with without actual problems. It was entirely gloom-making.

By the time he was let flee, the offending bit of floor carefully wrapped and shrunken in his pocket for examination back at the office, it was right on the line of being too late in the afternoon to be sent out on some other assignment. Since the park was right in front of him and the day was such a nice one that his mother would have sniffed and called it suspiciously and gaudily French, he decided to commune with nature for a bit on his way back.

Evidently, a lot of people had been thinking on the same lines. Pete liked that idea, that he and half of England had been on the same wavelength. It felt friendly, on a warm day like this. There were families all over the place, kids playing ball and shouting and all. He felt his shoulders fall a good three inches as the sounds of life settled around him, chased away the lofty chill of the museum's halls.

He ambled around the lake towards his favorite tree, greeting witches and wizards he knew and discreetly making balls just a tiny bit bouncier, kites just a tad sturdier and more streamlined. Once he passed close by a picnicking muggle couple whose tin of sardines his animagery-sensitized nose said would be a problem for them in a few hours. Not knowing how to actually fix that, he arranged for a bird to make it more obviously inedible.

There was a tiny little Oriental kid sitting in the old oak when he got there, staring morosely at the ducks through his bony knees. Pete gave him a smile. He didn't get one back, but the kid wasn't being rude. Rather, he didn't seem to notice Peter at all, just went on staring moodily off into forever. Pete shrugged to himself, and settled down against the trunk to soak in the dappled sunshine and the smells of loam and water.

After a while, a really _vicious_ little rubber ball hit him in the leg. Angling his head up with a smile and tossing the ball back, he called, "Hey, be careful where you bounce that thing!"

The boy squawked, jerked, nearly fell out of the tree, and stared down, cementing Pete's suspicion that the kid hadn't even seen him until then. "Ah—sorry!" he stammered, with one of those light-as-air accents that the Chinese muggles developed, wearing out recordings of Churchill to help them practice English.

"You look awfully somber," Pete commented. "Everything OK up there?"

The kid looked like he didn't understand at least one of those words. After a second, he gave up trying and volunteered, "We are have picnic. But was sit."

His smile widened, and he sympathized, "Your picnic was sit, huh? That can be troublesome. Er, trouble."

"Father angry," the kid agreed with a wince, and held up a bag of rather squished bread, all over crumbs. "Mother say go, feed birds."

"Well, be careful," Pete advised, "Some of them bite."

"Bite, I throw!" the kid declared, holding up his rubber ball with a big grin. "Rar!" Pete grinned, too. Uncertain again, the boy added, "If are not hide."

"Well," he laughed, "if you rar too loudly, they _will_ hide." He knew he would! "We'll have to be quiet and still. Do you think you can do that?"

The kid gave him a very puzzled look, full of scrunched-up button nose at the idea of being quiet and still. "Feed before, they are not quiet, not hide. They are GUA GUA," he quacked enthusiastically, "very noisy, and go to catch bread from air!"

"I'd like to see that," Pete admitted, grinning. "Why don't you show me how you do it?"

The boy made a thinking-about-it face, a little wicked at talking to strangers, and then agreeably clambered down from his branch. He took out a piece of bread and looked at it for a second, his face clouding. "First," he said quietly, "must give respect. Alive before. Now soon again part of life."

Pete had heard about hunters thanking meat before eating, but he thought thanking wheat and yeast was over the top. Still, you didn't argue with nice instincts. Unless you were Sirius, obviously.

The kid held out a nearly whole slice to a likely-looking bird, and sighed when all the rest came swarming in to fight over it. Evidently giving up on decorum, he shrugged and held the bag open to Pete, excitedly directing, "Make to jump!"

"Yes, sir!" Pete laughed, and started tossing chunks high enough in the air that the ducks had to snap at them.

They fed the birds in comfortable silence for a few minutes. The smell of good bread (it wasn't stale at all, which only seemed odd until he remembered that the kid was only doing this because his mother had needed him out of the way) started teasing his stomach. He'd been at the museum all day, after all, and it was past time for his tea. He surreptitiously snuck a slice or two himself, taking the edge off.

The kid caught him at it, and he gave a sheepish little smile. For a moment the expression on the little face was quite strange: blank, wide eyes, tight-throated. "Sorry," he told him. "Figured if it was good enough for the ducks… I hadn't eaten yet," he explained. "I'll save the rest for them."

"Not for people," the kid whispered, then cleared his throat and finished in a more normal tone, with an apologetic expression, "was sit." After a few more slices, he asked, with a hint of morbid curiosity, "Good?"

"It's just fine," Pete assured him.

The kid laughed with a weird, almost hysterical note, and ceremoniously handed him the last piece.

"I think that one's the scrappiest," Pete mused, pointing at a large hen goose. "Let's give it to her." He held it out, shooing the others away with his free hand. She snatched the piece away from him

and then

Pete had lived for seven years in Transfiguration Swottery Central

he knew an insufficiently permanent transfiguration falling apart when it happened _in his fingers_

the duck

in her beak

it was

it

an

it was

she swallowed it with a flip of her head and it was

he'd _eaten some_ and it was

it was an

The boy had screamed and jumped backwards, right into Pete's leg

he was trembling all over, they both were

because it was

Pete breathed heavily, his hands falling protectively on the kid's shoulders. He said, very carefully, "That looked like an ear. A person's ear. But it couldn't have been. You didn't give me an ear."

"It did!" the boy agreed, shaking hard. His back heaved with hard breaths, and after a moment he burst out, "I _said_ it wasn't food for people!"

Pete's throat closed right up. He removed his hands. He backed up a step. He looked down at the kid, looked hard. Putting his hand on his wand, he asked, just as carefully, "What happened to your accent?"

The boy looked back at him, equally frozen, looking just as sickened, just as green as Pete felt. After a moment, looking far too old for his bit of a face, he sighed, "Well, sod," and punched Pete with unavoidable speed and more oomph than someone his size should have been able to manage. Right in the fork.

When the world held anything more than pain, the boy was gone, and his ball and the empty bag, too. There was no trace of him, in fact, except for the floating flesh and feathers on the water.

Pete had made himself throw up (and scourgified it, and himself) quite a few times before the Aurors got there, until he'd several times brought up only bile. By the time the first duck bulged improbably and exploded around a foot, his stomach was well and truly purged. They told him over and over that there was nothing he could have done, he'd done nothing wrong, go home, take the hottest bath he could manage, get drunk, count his blessings, forget about it. Magically, if necessary. Dumbledore, when Peter reported in, said more or less the same, with added cocoa.

But he never felt clean again on two legs. And afterwards, more and more, he started to notice, or perhaps imagine, eyes on him. Scornful, evaluating, assessing. After a while, they began to feel almost inviting.

He could never bear to tell his friends. Moony would have understood, but he would have made Pete share with the other two, so he could be comforted. Moony was an incurable optimist. Probably he had to be to not run mad with his body turned against him, lying to the world every day. But Moony _was_ an optimist. It wouldn't happen like that.

Sirius wouldn't understand his horror. Not Sirius, who'd grown up with elf heads in the hall. He'd understand why Pete was ashamed to have been fooled and used, but not what it felt like to be ruined. Not Sirius, who had clawed himself out of the dark by sheer force of will, even though it meant walking away from everything he'd ever had a right to.

And Lily and James would never have looked at him the same way again. They would have just been repelled, the way he was himself. He would never have the chance to hold the baby when it was born, in case the corruption he'd taken in was contagious somehow. They were like that, James and especially Lily, so upright and pure nothing dirty could touch them. They wouldn't let it.

He knew he'd never be nearly one person with his friends again. He could never be open with them again, never let them know he'd been forced outside their enchanted circle of perfect light. If they ever knew, they'd never see him as anything more than scum commendably but pathetically trying to be human, fumbling smelly streaks onto the skirts of their robes. They were like that. Always been that way. Look at poor old Snape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry. I did say. There are no plans for it EVER to be worse than that, if it helps....
> 
> if you felt you'd better skip the experience but still need to know why, exactly, Peter feels he'll never be clean and pure like other human beings and James and Lily the Light and Righteous would surely reject him if they knew?
> 
> That bread he ate that was supposed to be for the ducks? Soylent green. He found out. Violations don't feel better because you're quite sure you didn't want them.


	4. Undisclosed / Dye Urn Alley (off Diagon)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus probably would not realize how doomed he has just become even if he was not thoroughly distracted by blaring Deep Purple and Yes at his pureblood neighbors while baking apple scones.

The Dark Lord was gracious enough to wait until Severus had had his hysterical breakdown and Evan had brutally pounded him back to some semblance of coherence to summon him. Severus was deeply, deeply grateful that, when he arrived, it was just the two of them and Acanthus, the giant death adder ( _Elapidae acanthopis_ , both its body and venom magically enhanced _._ Their lord, no one said out loud, was not as clever about names as he fancied himself. Severus's puns never amused anyone else either, but at least he knew it. And they made Ev groan and droop on him and give him huge blue pained pathos eyes, which was really all he wanted. Possibly out of life. Other than curing everything, obviously).

He was less grateful, although of course it was good old-fashioned mandatory discipline to say _thank you_ anyway, for the thoroughly unsurprising two fifteen-second rounds of Cruciatus. These were for, respectively, risking getting himself noticed without instruction when he knew very well there was often an enemy watching him closely, and making an utter botch of his follow-through.

No, not grateful, because _ohgodow with associated twitching for hours_ , but even to himself he admitted to having had them coming. He privately thought he deserved worse. He shouldn't have wasted time brooding, or indulged his vengeful streak playing with Pettigrew no matter how much the simpering, sycophantic, deceptively sneaky little bastard deserved trouble. Even if all he'd meant was the private satisfaction of having made a Marauder help him and go off feeling good about it, with the option of rubbing it in his face later if advisable.

He could have gotten out cleanly if he'd been more efficient, and he should have been. He knew perfectly well that transfiguration wasn't his strong point. Digestion would have stabilized the bread, but he shouldn't have relied on its transformation lasting that long.

The long-term fallout was theoretically worlds better than the crucios, and actually galaxies worse. Apparently, despite abysmally muffing the tail end of his unauthorized little operation, he'd shown a good deal of unsuspected potential and a turn of mind that the Dark Lord could put to good use.

In particular, Voldemort was pleased that he hadn't shot up the Mark. Asked in a hurt voice why he suspected Severus of being so completely boneheaded as that, he explained that some of his more devout were so justifiably proud of their kills that they were blinded to the politics that made claiming them a Bad Idea. Boasting with the Mark was becoming a widespread dream, and keeping it from becoming more than that was becoming a struggle.

He was, therefore, instructed to consider himself available for instruction whenever 'the potioneering old fool' that might provide the Dark Lord with a carrot to tempt the werewolves with didn't need him.

"All right, Spike?" Ev asked languidly when he dragged himself back home, anxiety showing only in the way his eyes locked onto Severus's face and stayed there. This was a pleasantry, thank god, and he didn't have to answer it. Evan only _looked_ vague and absentminded. After only a few seconds perusal Ev had maneuvered him to the sofa and was pouring him a large draught of nervine potion with a splash of whiskey in, and a dash of tincture of valerian for good measure.

Severus drank nearly all of it in one swallow, afraid a post-curse convulsion might make him drop it if he didn't hurry up. He stared into the remaining half-cup despondently and said, "He wants me to spy. Not gossip-trawling like you and Narcissa. Scout or mole."

Evan's jaw landed on the floor in tandem with the whiskey decanter. After a moment he swallowed, and said without levity, "Salazar help us all."

"As soon as possible," Severus agreed grimly, and slammed back the last measure of potion.

"Up," Ev directed, and hauled Severus into the bathroom for a long, hot soak into which he poured fragrant splashes of pine, sandalwood, and peony oils, the zest of an entire orange, and, the best by far, himself. Evan hadn't even tried for any Os on his NEWTs, but if there'd been one for hedonism, Severus kept telling him sardonically, he wouldn't have had to try.

Evan never seemed to notice this was supposed to be sarcasm rather than praise. Which was probably, Severus would never _ever_ admit, for the best. His truly encyclopaedic knowledge of how to force a mood on everyone in a room with an incense burner and a crowbar was probably useful in his work, as well, but Severus couldn't help but think it made him a bit of a walking cliche. More or less fortunately, depending on your point of view in a given moment, Evan would probably, if asked, define 'embarrassment' as 'a breath lozenge for a donkey without a saddle.'

(Because he enjoyed 'rescuing' Severus from (technically) self-inflicted concussions.)

In the morning, Severus was bothered by Sue-Fudge-from-downstairs and Amy-Bones-from-the-flat-next-door. Ostensibly, as always, they were dropping by to complain about him blaring music while cooking a ridiculously large appreciative-breakfast spread.

In fact, also as always, they were cadging for his extras, although he wasn't sure they knew it. In any case, they were both quite happy to be sent away with steaming paper bags of spiced-apple scones for the families. Which was why he'd over-cooked and not used a silencing charm in the first place.

Severus loved, loved, loved that all their neighbors were Hufflepuff alums. It wasn't a happy coincidence, either; choices like that were so obvious to Evan that he didn't really think about them. It wasn't a flat-picking criteria that would even have occurred to Severus, but it made his life so much more pleasant than it might have been. They were so easy to deal with, and he never had to have leftovers lying around if he didn't want them. He could get away with practically any neighborly sin if he made the occasional gesture they interpreted as awkwardly-attempted sociability.

He even actually quite liked Bones, as long as they didn't spend enough time together that it devolved into small talk or stories about her hearty outdoorsiness. The stories themselves were all right. It was the way she kept breaking off to tell him he looked like a plant that didn't get enough sun and then trying to drag him out to do things he neither wanted to do nor had time for that palled.

Sitting for the Fudges' kid on occasion wasn't too bad, either. It left them grateful, which was useful, and it wasn't as if Severus had anyone else to play gobstones with. His mother wasn't exactly on the Floo. Ev was good for chess and go, but if Severus tried to make him play something messy he put on a smock and a pained expression and shuddered a lot and was generally too ridiculous not to be pounced and mussed and kissed all over his ridiculous face.

Obviously they did this often, but gobstones did not actually get played.

The neighbors made Evan happy, too, since he always had someone available for a chat or spot of useful gossip when Severus was busy, the restless and unsoothable sort of cranky, or otherwise wanted to be left alone with a journal or a cauldron or one of the books Ev didn't care for. And, Evan was always pointing out, they Knew People.

Severus usually replied to this with, "They are people, Ev."

"That's how it works," Evan would agree.

"Snob."

"Prole."

This generally ended with the neighbors pounding on the door to complain about the thumping and staying over tea to join the debate over whether it mattered whether people were People. This, Evan said, was good for them, as Amy was in government and so was Sue's husband (who they called Neil because Severus could not get through the first half of 'Cornelius' without terrible, terrible jokes). Severus said it was a botheration, and meant it, but that didn't mean he thought Ev was wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for the summary, how's that for ridiculous. I'm aware there's some fanon floating around that everyone at Hogwarts had a thing for The Clash and the punk movement generally. I think this 'verse's Sirius did, before he got bored with the repetitive drumming... this Severus was _not_ in a rebellious punky pass-me-the-smokes-and-eyeliner dive. He's still invested in his pureblood friends and not making things too difficult for them, even if he also keeps a toe (if not a foot) in the Muggle world (enough to pass if he should ever have to) and thinks the game they have to play is a ridiculous and irritating yawner. He was also in Flitwick's music club and took arithmancy, and has enough of a musical theory and math background to appreciate a band that uses classical, medieval, and jazz influence while also being energetic. These days, he would be _all over_ neoclassical and symphonic metal, TSO, Cello Fury...
> 
>  
> 
> _Of course he's a snob. DUH._
> 
>  
> 
> (But he'd also buy Lancashire Hotpots songs if they existed yet, and even listen to most of them at least once. Because _that's what you do_ for a home band, if you can, when your area really does not spawn them. Besides, they have songs about how awesome tea is and not forgetting your keys and that. The latter really plays to Severus's general opinion of humanity.)


	5. Malfoy Manor, Amesbury, Wiltshire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus isn't the only Slytherin in his year who can see trouble coming a mile away (just the only one who freaks out high decibel).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** for snobbery, canonical fpreg, and Narcissa's affected style. Dumb blondes, yeah-huh, ok, we believe you, Slytherin...

"No offense, coz," Evan said, unpacking his paints, "but sometimes I could _publicly slander_ your brother-in-law."

There was no question as to which brother-in-law he meant. The Dreadful Tonks Family Did Not Exist. Andi and the Prismlette might exist in select twigs of the family tree, very quietly, but the _Tonks Family_ didn't. And if they had existed, it would not have been technically possible to slander the Odious Mudblood-In-Law.

Evan had, actually, met Ted Tonks, in a spirit of fairness. After all, his own other half was scarcely less of a lead balloon, on paper. Half Severus's blood was beyond worthless, and though the other half was peerless, the way he'd been _raised!_ But when you got past the pedigree, the rumors, the slander that turned his hawkish, unpadded bones ugly if you listened instead of looked, the pressurized porcupine-prickles dipped in basilisk venom and Extract of Ravenclaw, the wary, bristling, skinless oversensitivity, and the complete incompetence with and lack of use for every form of social lubrication…

(Not a quick or easy project; it had taken Ev a few years of forced proximity. But when Spike did let you in, oh, worth it. He'd had to teach himself not to show off: what if someone else realized and, not content with sharing, tried to tempt his right hand away? Probability it would work: insignificant. Probability Severus would be amused, smug, flattered, or even annoyed instead of creeped out or some flavor of hysterical: not measurable without an engorgement charm. He still had a bit of a Thing about being noticed when he didn't mean to be. Evan loved soothing and teasing Severus down from his hysterical flails—or just wearing him out until he cared less, on a broom or, better, in private. However, he greatly preferred the bristly fits to be over some potions or spellcrafting journal publishing something slipshod than because Severus was really upset. That was just… upsetting.)

So Evan had been willing to give Tonks the benefit of the doubt, but he hadn't been impressed. The man was pleasant enough, but nothing special. A slovenly ox, in fact. And when Evan had looked at the stains on his hands… he hoped Andi really loved the lump, and saw things in him Evan didn't. Andi had always turned too easily to potions for comfort. Evan just hoped it was Tonks himself making her happy, and not what he, as a brewer, could easily give her. Or, at least, that he was too stupid to know the difference.

No, there could be no doubt that he'd meant Rodolphus. Therefore, Narcissa merely raised her tea to her lips to smile over it at him in perplexity. "Why would I be offended, darling? He is something of an embarrassment, after all; so terribly _squirely_. I'll do it myself, if you like."

It was an open secret that Narcissa still hadn't quite forgiven Lestrange, charming in his way though he was, for worshiping her sister instead of encouraging anything like restraint in her. Of course, Bellatrix was just as disappointed about Lucius not discouraging _her_ sister's prissiness. It was for the best, everyone else (including said husbands) supposed. The prospect of what would happen if those two ever started working together instead of squabbling terrified.

"Oh, lor'!" Evan expostulated, flinching melodramatically. "Don't exert yourself on my account, Narcissa; the cobra would shred me."

"And when are you going to make an honest woman of that boy?" she asked, laughing.

"When he gets himself some decent relatives to show off for Mum, he says. Or at least nets a job with real wages and stops being so damned prickly on the subject of who buys the damned groceries," he sigh-smiled back, a bit pained by the memory of snappishness past. "Which would be, by my estimation, on or about the fifteenth of Neversoever, since all the decent-paying Potions work is commercial."

He let himself imagine, just for a moment, the absolute nightmare of Severus bored stiff brewing the same thing every day. Eeuurrgh was not the word. It would be almost as bad as Severus thinking he was _being supported_. Evan wasn't sure anything could make his life more unpleasant than that would, except his porcupine being actually dead.

"Pity," Narcissa mourned lightly, sparkling at him over her cup. "All those awful drab colors he wears… I would so like to see him in white."

"Not appropriate," he preened, shifting with smug reminiscence in his chair. Spike didn't go all soft and clingsome on him nearly often enough for it to stop being an exotic treat and get wearing. Every single time was a very special memory for him, and kept in his very special pensieve. Even if the circumstances prompting them usually, as now, made him quietly homicidal.

She zapped him lightly with her wand in mock-rebuke. "Bragging is so ill-mannered, darling!"

Evan gave her a long, slow look with humorously cocked eyebrow, which he transferred to his nearly-finished canvas before returning it to her. "You've changed your mind, then? Don't finish the painting?" he asked innocently.

"Oh, you!" she huffed, a hand curling in not-so-secret pleasure about her middle. "It isn't bragging in the least! It's only that Lucius is always so _insecure_ about making his parents proud, poor pet. I shan't leave my boy—or girl, of course—under any misapprehension about how much he's wanted."

Neither of them mentioned how very slim her frame was, including about the hips. Or how much trouble she'd had already. Or how her father had given up on a male heir when her own mother's third near-death experience wasn't the charm.

"I'll ask Spike about making a copy of his notes for you, if you like," he suggested. "In a nice binding, for some milestone birthday. So young Thingy will know how much trouble you've taken over him."

"That's a lovely idea," she said warmly, her eye only twitching a little at _T_ _hingy_. "Thank you, darling."

"I don't know if he will, mind," he warned, squeezing paints onto his palette. "It's exactly the sort of thing he does like to show off, but he can be awfully private about his work. The mater sent Linkin 'round to do our spring cleaning last week, as a Beltane present, and when he stepped into the stillroom I had to intervene before the poor old thing lost his ears."

"We'll work him 'round," she said, sedately wicked. "Don't forget to give Auntie Cal my best when you see her next, speaking of your mother. And my uncle, of course." It was Evan's father who was her uncle by blood, but she and Ev's mother were both Black women. That was apparently a much closer bond. Ev didn't ask questions.

"Will do, and mine to Aunt Dru," he said, his preparations finished. "All right, ready. I'd like you to start out sitting down today."

All was stillness and sunshine steeped in the smell of oils and minerals and Severus's mild brush-cleaning solution for a few hours, until the light was too much changed. Evan could have simulated it with a charm, naturally. When your sitters were heavily pregnant or otherwise less than sprightly, you took the excuse to end early, and did not mention their feet, backs, or bladders.

Spike's brush-cleaner wasn't any better than the commercial one as far as the actual cleaning went. But it was less smelly, and didn't eat the glue. Besides, when Spike wanted to do something for you, your choices were: let him, give a not only good but excellent reason why not while thanking him warmly for the thought from zero inches away from his mouth, or endure the rejected snarling for days.

He got quite a few positions in, turning her and moving her hands this way and that, eyes fixed hard and clever on her shapes and colors and shadows, his wand hand as light on the easel as if it were eggshell. At the side of his sight the brushes darted, buzzing and flitting like a swarm of hummingbirds, keeping up with his vision.

No one had yet worked out how to keep the canvas from flickering distractingly as it soaked up image after image, pose after pose. No matter. He'd started grinding his father's pigments, washing the un-handled brushes, and copying out shapes manually young. Nearly as young as Severus had been placed on a step-stool with a wooden spoon to practice counting his strokes on the stew and sent to scavenge leaves and flowers. Evan was an old hand by now, the flashing canvas long since become a mere drumbeat to slow his breath and pace his eye.

Narcissa called for a fresh tea tray with sandwiches while he cleaned up. When he'd settled by her and had his mouth well and truly full, she asked, "How has poor Rodolphus offended, then? Honestly, Evan, darling, I didn't think you _had_ a temper."

Even made a _most_ impolite noise around his cress-and-firecrab, very nearly a growl. She had, of course, timed her question so he wouldn't be able to verbalize that. "I don't know how that man sorted green," he said when he'd swallowed. "Do you think he thinks?"

"Why, I couldn't say," she said, beatifically innocent with a hint of sympathy. "On pure ruthlessness, I suppose. Is there some trouble?"

"The amount of trouble he's gotten Spike into is possibly unquantifiable," he answered morosely, restraining the juvenile impulse to shred a second sandwich and stab it with a fork.

"That sounds serious," she said, with a little frown, moving another sandwich to his plate. "Try the prawns, do; Melly's done something rather amusing with them."

"Of course, it's a purely personal matter," he said, with the special inflection that drew attention to her white, unmarked forearms.

He himself had been saved from having the Mark put somewhere easily revealed by a prior tattoo. Their Lord hadn't been especially pleased to learn that keeping the twined pair of windswept trees with the hearth burning green and silver-black at their center was a dealbreaker for him, and Evan's father hadn't been, either. He had pointed out, though, that he was a _painter,_ and the odds of a very intricate burn-looking thing on his forearm going unremarked were fairly puny, it was amazing Dad had managed. _Two_ of them never rolling up their sleeves was going to stop looking like a merely personal eccentricity and start looking like Something Else.

He'd offered the sole of his foot instead, and tried not to look like he'd noticed Voldemort deciding whether to wish he'd thought of that earlier. Or to look relieved when the Dark Lord had visibly decided no, he didn't want his followers feeling they were _desperate_ to hide the Mark. It was supposed to feel like a privilege, not a brand. Even if it had bloody well felt like one, and did again every time they were summoned. Ev tried not to be too annoyed with Dad for wanting that for him. It got harder every time he saw Spike and Reggie's arms twitch.

So he and Spike could still go to the beach when Ev could drag him, even though Spike was flatly uninterested in brewing up waterproof cosmetics. Not even strangers found it too terribly odd when Severus went about in shirtsleeves or even his frock coat at technically-inappropriate times. He was just that kind of person, always had been. People would walk off thinking he'd been wearing a waistcoat even when it had actually been a dressing gown or jumper.

"Then, by all means, don't tell me the details!" she said with a casual laugh, eyes narrowing in focus.

"No indeed. Only, it seems that your brother-in-law's brought Severus to the notice of one of Luke's richer and more quick-tempered friends. He thinks Severus can do him a favor. And you know Spike, ask him to do something and he goes over all hard-done-by and grumpy and gratified and won't stop till it's done if it kills him—"

Narcissa sighed, lifting her eyes to the ceiling with a weary expression. This wasn't (only) plausible-deniability code for 'he can't refuse the Dark Lord.' It was literally true. Madam Pomfrey had actually had to hold Slughorn up at wandpoint during their NEWT year to make him stop urging Severus to switch out of the Quidditch team's reserve rota for games.

Even then Evan had had to enlist Reggie's sad-puppy eyes and pleas for extra tutoring to keep Severus from playing. That had cost him, as handing Spike a pot of red ink turned him into a slavering, bloodthirsty grammar-basilisk with no impulse control. Regulus, understandably, did not, thank you, want any more Sodding Snape Commentary(TM) than he absolutely needed.

And even _that_ hadn't been done it. Evan had had to make that thick arse Avery realize he was running out of chances to win glory on the pitch and get threateningly possessive over them, too, before Severus stopped being jittery over was-he-contributing-enough.

"But this isn't in his line," Evan went on. "Frankly, coz, neither of us is sure he can manage it."

"Heavens," she said, not sounding flighty at all for a moment. "Then I shall have to have a word with Lucius. Those healers at St. Mungo's are all such rot, you know," she added, lightly again. "And patronizing? My _dear_! Quite impossible. I can't have anything interfering with my regimen."

"I knew you'd want to know," Evan agreed. It was a good thing he was sitting down, or his knees might have wobbled in relief. "I think Spike might kill Lestrange himself if he had to start _again_ with you, although he does have a soft spot for the fellow." He took a bite of sandwich, and his eyebrows lifted. "My compliments to Melly; this is quite as good as you promised."

"Opposites attracting, I suppose," Narcissa mused, with a smile over the prawns. She took a sandwich herself. "Incidentally, darling, I wish you'd stop calling Lucius by that dreadful, common nickname. It upsets him so." Impish, she clearly wished no such thing. Narcissa was fortunate enough to be fond of her husband, but she wasn't blind to his _nouveau riche_ overcompensation. Nor had she given up hope that enough gentle teasing by staunch allies would convince him to relax.

This was optimistic of her: the Malfoys had been 'new money' for almost as long as the Blacks had been universally acknowledged nobility. Even in the wizarding world, that could have been more than long enough. They nevertheless remained, somehow, not quite quite.

"How unforgivably uncouth of me," he mourned, lifting the back of his hand to his forehead. When they'd both successfully swallowed their giggles very nearly like grownups, he asked, "Would you like to see the portrait? One more sitting, I think, and it'll be all done bar the last charms."

"To tell you the truth," she admitted, dimpling in a demure suggestion of the called-for embarrassment she in no way felt, "I'm getting to the point of not wanting to take one little step more than necessary. It must sound dreadfully lazy, but…"

"If you can stomach it," he offered cheerfully, "I might ask my neighbors what they did when they were as far along as you. You never know, the Sprout might share out tips among her Sett, and it would give them so much pleasure to think they might be of help to you."

"I daresay it would," the youngest Rosier-Black daughter said, tapping her impeccably formed lips thoughtfully with one smooth, oval nail, only a shadow of cynicism in her voice. No varnish, paints, or sparkly charms for Narcissa, only a perfect, glassy shine. "How kind they sound. Let me see… Amelia Bones and Susan Fudge, aren't they?" He nodded, and she smiled. "Ask them by all means, darling. And I'll have them to tea in a week or so to thank them for their indispensable advice."

"Useful or otherwise," he observed, leaning back in amusement and taking another little sandwich. This one turned out to be cucumber with herbed re'em butter, a particular favorite of his. Severus insisted that re'em dairy was sour as bad milk and made the flat smell like mold. Severus had freakish stillroom-honed senses that normal people did not understand. Only the sense-memory of Linky's wooden spoon on his knuckles kept Evan from snaffling the lot while he could.

"Good intentions are received as treasures whatever comes of them," Narcissa declared, leaving unspoken the obvious codicil: _Hufflepuffs assume._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had the Manor at Avebury before. This was a typo. It's at Amesbury, because they do Beltane at Stonehenge. I also typed 'Paul Bunyon' instead of 'John' for the opening quote's citation _when I had the book open in front of me_. Of course, no one noticed _that_ one for _months_ , including my beta, so I don't know why I'm calling attention to this...


	6. Undisclosed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Dark Lord must choose whether to kill young Snape as a probable liability or use the living crap out of him. He's going to need a headache potion first. Badly. What with all the headdesking. (Hey, look, a brewer!)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings** for casual torture (barely worth mentioning by DE standards) and creepy possessive language.

"You approve of the sandwiches?" the Dark Lord inquired, dangerously bland.

"I wouldn't presume to approve, my Lord," Severus said, hoping he wouldn't _too_ much regret the flicker of enjoyment he evidently hadn't been able to keep out of his eyes. "Rather, I _notice_ that it's a ploughman's lunch. And I'm quite ready to work."

"Are you?" his master mused. "And yet, I've been peppered by hints from young Malfoy that you aren't up to any new responsibilities."

Severus's eyebrows drew together and winged up at the ends in surprised annoyance. "If my Lord is listening to his hints," he said, "then it must be his business, although I can't see how."

"You claim not to have set him about it?"

"Certainly not knowingly or purposefully, my Lord," Severus replied. He hadn't, in fact, even seen Luke since the bonfire, but only fools volunteered information. This was not company in which it was safe to be foolish. He might need to make an implication later on.

"Then tell me," the Dark Lord invited, stroking his snake's nose gently, "how it came to be that I have been annoyed about you."

Fortunately (for a given definition of fortunate), Severus had started practicing to keep fear out of his face years before he'd ever seen a train. "If I must speculate," he answered, "well… I have been worried I won't be able to manage what you might ask of me, my Lord. It's been weighing on my mind, and I shouldn't be surprised if my friends _have_ noticed."

The sharp, dark eyes pierced into him. He didn't bother trying to shove anything down to the bottom of his mind, as he'd had nothing to look suspicious about when it started. Unfortunately, his brewer's senses betrayed him, and he thought absently, _Cider-colored eyes, but made with molasses. Too much molasses, actually; on the reddish side._ — _Oh, **hell,** did I say that out **loud**?!_

When he had his breath back and could think and stand again, Voldemort asked him, incredulous, "Are you actively suicidal, boy?"

"Er," he said, his head all swimmy with the rush of pain gone away. "No? I just notice things, honestly, sir, it just happens."

"Now I understand your friends' concern," the Dark Lord said, pinching the bridge of his patrician nose. "Impertinent observations aside, if you ever second-guess me again, young Snape, a crucio will be the least of it."

"Well, I'm not suicidal, my Lord," Severus told him, still gloomy-drunk with endorphins, "but if that's the case I suppose you'd better kill me now and have done. I don't think I can help thinking about things. Or how they could go wrong. It just _happens,_ " he repeated, staring at the ground and fully expecting to be hexed into it again.

"You've already given yourself to me," the Dark Lord pointed out, with the mix of disbelief faintly tinged with entertainment and despair that Severus got from… almost everyone who didn't loathe him, actually. Regularly. "Suppose you do me the honor of trusting me, and my judgment?"

Severus stared at him, and blurted, "What do you—oh," he finished thoughtfully. He stared at the ground some more, pulling himself into a cross-legged position and frowning.

Eventually, he looked up at his master and said, "Yes, I see, sir. I'm sorry. But, that is, I see what you mean, but I can't understand what _you_ see that would make you think—I mean, my Lord, er…" His mouth screwed up despondently as the muscles in his left leg trilled like harpstrings, "My Lord, I had to fight the Hat to get into Slytherin, and I really do try, sir, but there are things I can't _do_. Like, er, subtle. My Lord, how can someone who can't reliably manage subtle be a spy? I'll try whatever you want me to," he promised, meeting his master's eyes earnestly, "as hard as I can, but I just don't see how."

"But I do," Voldemort told him. Severus sighed, and bent his head in acquiescence, gloomily thinking, _Dying because one's friends' relatives are fanatics seems such a waste_. The Dark Lord patted his arm. "On your feet, my soldier, and eat of my table," he ordered.

"Yes, my Lord," Severus answered. "May I take an anticonvulsant? This," he gestured at the bit of him currently twitching (his cheek), "might be distracting." Permission obtained, he pulled a vial from some pocket and drank from it as he sat, chasing it with a bite of raw onion.

"Some people would put that in the sandwich," the Dark Lord mentioned, bemused, taking the other seat. The sun glinted off the beginnings of silver at his temples, and the snake coiled comfortably about his shoulders.

Severus tentatively crooked a bit of a smile at him ( _push your luck, push your luck, if you're not afraid if him you can't have any reason to be)_ , and replied, "I like uncooked simples, sir. You know you're eating them; you can taste what makes them potent."

"And they're harder to poison?" Voldemort proposed, a bit silky.

"Not impossible, though," Severus said thoughtfully, tapping the apple laid out for him with his wand, so that it fell into slices. "It's said by some that Augustus Caesar died of figs poisoned on the tree." He ate a slice and offered the plate to his master.

Voldemort ate one solemnly, and watched his man carefully for signs of relief. He didn't see any, and commented on it. Severus shrugged, and replied, "It's only useful to be roundabout about killing if the intended victim is hard to access, or if their death will make trouble for the killer. If my Lord needs to kill one or curse one of his own, there are no such obstacles. Whereas there are such things as preventative antidotes."

"Practical. Suppose you apply that practicality to my purpose."

Severus blinked at him. "Of course," he said, and his tone said _of course,_ too. "How?"

"Your humility does you credit, Severus," Voldemort said, not unkindly, "And I imagine it's been of use to you, moving among the… wealthy as you do." A very familiar flash of class resentment in the dark eyes, quickly buried, made him smile. "Are you confident of your mind?"

"Largely," Severus said warily. "With limitations. And," he frowned, seeking the right word and settling on, "fluctations."

"And it's a wise man who knows them," he said, flicking his fingers dismissively. "Tell me, my own, if I were to ask it of you, how would you kill, say," who had the boy's tormentor at school been? That Gryffie oaf Charlie Potter's son, taking after his Black mama. Dear Dorea, so swift on the pitch, obliging in the greenhouses, and disdainful in the halls, whose dubious charms and holier-than-thou public repudiations had driven Anthea Mulciber very nearly off the Astronomy Tower. It had taken Tom's whole circle to pull her out of it, and had been _unrelentingly_ tedious. Her loyalty was just as unrelenting, though, as was her wife's, and their son's. These things did pay off.

Yes, Charlie's boy was the one. Bella had been most conflicted about the feud. Her cousins, close and distant, going after the uppity mudblood who had his claws in her baby sister and favorite little pet cousin together should have been cause for celebration. Only she couldn't cheer them on or be encouraged, because they said they were doing it for House and blood-treacherous reasons, said it was because their target was on _her_ side. He finished, "The young Mr. Potter?"

"With my fucking _teeth_ ," Severus snarled immediately, and instantly clapped his hands over his mouth, meeting the Dark Lord's gaze with wide, apprehensive eyes.

Voldemort laughed: a full rich laugh, if on the high side for a man. "Fluctuations," he echoed. "I see. And if I asked you to do it more circumspectly than that?" He watched Severus think about it.

"In this scenario," his man asked, "ought he to be the only death?"

"In any scenario I put to you," the Dark Lord told him, "unless I tell you otherwise, assume that I want precision work, and to be able to use my knife again."

Severus nodded, just plainly, making Voldemort still his face to keep from staring. No relief, no gratitude or thrill at an assumption that he was being favored, no suspicious or anxious _but would I be allowed to spare myself if the mission weren't hypothetical_ look that tried to divine his intentions. Just a thinking nod, and a thinking frown as Severus drummed his fingers on the table for a moment.

The young Snape's muddled bloodline, allies, and OWL scores had, as a package, attracted the Dark Lord's attention, and since then he'd been hearing _mad, odd, hard to read, runs hot and not just cold but glacial._ It had all rung in his ears like the echoes of stupid, drunken muggles twice the size he'd been then, led him to welcome what had seemed at the Marking ceremony like a cool and pragmatic, if sardonic and indifferent, mind into his ranks. A hostage for the even more indifferent Rosier heir, he'd thought, would be welcome, as would a potion-maker of Snape's skill and, more, potential. The apprenticeship he'd taken on had been a bonus. Although working purebloods around to the idea of courting nonhuman allies was going to take (was taking) some work, the way the Ministry treated everyone but wizards was _such_ an opportunity. The werewolves in particular, he was sure, needed only a taste of pride to pull themselves out of omega-mind and get angry.

And yet he was beginning to think there was something to those rumors—and yet again, he found himself believing that nod, which meant any madness here could probably be turned to his purpose. As he looked at his man, Severus was thinking only of the task he was set. Voldemort could see his eyes, and, knowing, didn't need belief.

"He's sociable," Severus said slowly, after drumming out quite a bit of what the Dark Lord recognized after a while, rather pained, as _Die Forelle_. "And loud. I mean, he's very good at drawing attention when he wants to. In-person encounters would be ill-advised. He's not alone often except when he's stalking me, and attacking him then would make my involvement obviously probable. There are people I'm certain he tells when he's doing it." He looked up at his master and said, "I'd have to say his point of greatest vulnerability is his hair."

"Explain."

"He runs his hands through it a lot," Severus explained, all dispassion except for the faintest curl to his lip. "Disarranges it. And he's not the sort of person to think about less than obvious threats, or to suppose himself vulnerable enough to have need of being chronically armored. I suspect he leaves a positive trail of follicles, and that a simple _accio_ would provide one with ample material for polyjuice or sympathetic magic. If he has had the sense to guard himself, well, he has Quidditch instincts. Played Chaser, and Seeker for longer. More likely to catch than duck, especially something Snitch-like."

"You wouldn't get to him through his wife? He must be alone with her at times."

" _I_ wouldn't," Severus said, a certain wryness about his expression revealing that he wasn't blind to how loaded this question was, and didn't hope Voldemort was. "A possibility, if he takes more precautions than I suspect. But it wouldn't be my inclination; it would be riskier."

"How so?"

He shrugged. "Any number of reasons, but primarily: simple is best. The fewer human, animal, and weather-dependent factors in an operation, the more likely it is to go according to plan."

"A person under imperio isn't unpredictable," Voldemort mentioned, stroking his pet snake again.

"Imperio isn't infallible," Severus said. "Aurors know how to build up any natural ability to resist a person might have, and they have friends that are Aurors. Evans—that is, Miss Evans as was—has always been thoroughly pigheaded and single-minded, my Lord. She's the last person I'd count on to go under, after Geoff Goyle. Tunnel vision. Implacable. More and more immune to reason and persuasion as she got older, and she never had enough sense to understand that threats might be anything more powerful than displays of bad taste."

"Surely not."

"I know," Severus agreed with a hopeless helplessness. "Courage is one thing, but one wouldn't think actual intrepidity a trait likely to survive long enough to breed inheritors."

"Mm." He regarded his man for another long moment, heavy-lidded. The girl sounded very like Bellatrix; Voldemort would remember her name. "And the old fool?"

"My lord?"

"Dumbledore, Severus. How would you kill him?"

There was another, much longer silence. Finally, Severus asked dubiously, "And we're still operating under the mission parameters of 'you don't get your knife broken,' my Lord?"

"Did I say otherwise?"

"Er… then… no idea. Sorry, my Lord; I don't think it could be done."

"A decrepit piece of senility like that," Voldemort said softly, drawing his wand, "And you 'don't think it could be done.'"

Severus swallowed convulsively, but met his eyes, solid. "You're testing my determination to face you with the truth, my Lord, when you imply that a wizard of his experience and resource, who acts dotty if not senile but even so hasn't been removed from any of his several very responsible positions, should be treated lightly. Surely."

Voldemort advanced on him, watching with pleasure as the thin throat tightened, its muscles jumping, as the eyes widened in apprehension but never flinched from his. He put his hands on his man's shoulders, gently, and washed up the quivering throat until he was cupping the tense, blank face in his long fingers. "Severus," he said quietly. "Severus. Severus, needle eye, glaive tongue, Severus my own, do you see now how well I can use you?"

The dark eyes flashed up at him, and for a moment there was nothing between them but the warm certainty of willing feudalism. The Dark Lord basked in it. Then Severus's eyes clouded again, and he started, "But—"

"Salazar on a _staff_ ," Voldemort snarled in disgust, and cursed the young idiot back down into the ground. When he lifted the pain, his man collapsed onto his back, white and sweating, head tilted back slackly with the long, hollow line of his throat completely exposed.

To his amazement, the boy was _laughing,_ grinning loopily up at him, black eyes sparkling with conspiratorial and uncomplicated pleasure.

If any of his aristocratic servants had been there to see, Lord Voldemort might have chased all understanding from his face. He would have been mortified (read: judiciously homicidal as a prevention against the spreading of rumors) if any of them had realized what it meant.

Tom Riddle, too, had grown up calloused and scarred as a hard-mouthed horse under the rod of filthy, insignificant fools who could never hope to understand him, and then put on the silver-green. He hadn't, it turned out, quite forgotten the blinding, heady joy of being punished for not holding his head high enough.

The still-mostly-a-man who'd been that smarting, chafing, seething, charming boy smiled indulgently, and sternly commanded, "The next time I summon you, my lad, you _will_ be 'quite ready to work.'"

"My Lord," his greenest sapling agreed, low and certain, shining limply up at him with afterglow eyes.

Not one to waste an opportunity, Voldemort slid through them into his mind again, just enough to resonate all through him. "Now, let us address your fears, my own. It's said that ill-speaking is no guarantor of honesty, but it needed saying because it's so poorly understood. And so, Severus, this is the way you will slither in…"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> St. Augustine meant the unfinished/unpracticed/poorly-crafted meaning of rude when he said (AD 397) a thing is not "necessarily true because rudely uttered, nor untrue because crafted magnificently." In Murder Must Advertise (1933), however, Dorothy Sayers had her detective credit him with being the only man who's ever seen through rudeness. I will leave it to you which of them a prig like Riddle who grew up in a poor and quite possibly religious '50s orphanage was forced to read and probably copy lines out of as a child... but our antihero is a budding master of spin. ;)
> 
> Schubert's _Die Forelle_ is a song about happy, carefree trouts who allow themselves to get caught by a clever, coldblooded fisherman even though the water is clear and they're faster than he is. The narrator is sad and angry for them and, in an often-omitted verse, warns young maidens not to be that dumb about boys just because youth makes them feel powerful.
> 
> Like Evan's parents, James' had him later in life than would be usual for muggles. Only in James's case, it's at least quasi-canonical. :D
> 
> Yes, a basic creative writing rule was borked in this chapter. Tom's fault. He's grabby as well as a creeper. Will not be a regular thing.


	7. #18 Dye Urn Alley #18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Worried about the divisive effect of having to keep the Dark Lord's secrets in the future, Severus wants to be sure he's carrying his own weight with his friends. Worried Spike's pumpkin juice has been cut with the bad drugs, Evan wants to try cognitive recalibration.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first chapter where there's any major difference between this version of the story and the gen version. By the end of the final edit the differences kind of amused me (or maybe it was just the Evan-muse complaining about getting dizzy from switching his heart-eyes on and off in comparative edits), so idk, here's the link to the [genfic](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9920703/1/Valley-of-the-Shadow-gen) again. vOv
> 
>  **Warnings** : Insecurity. Expository dialogue. Sleepy, cranky, purple-tinted... not prose, I don't even know, Ev's a bit of a... Look, purebloods with the drama. He doesn't have a snake cane, if that helps.

"You look tired," Evan frowned. "Meeting go all right?" He was delighted, if not enlightened, when Severus answered him only with an erumpent tackle.

Later:

"Ev?"

"Mmmmm?"

"Don't try to manipulate the hypersensitive megalomaniac anymore, will you?"

"…Eh?"

"Or at least don't use the Platinum Peacock."

"…Ah. Point."

"Ta." Rustling. "'Night, thorn."

"'Night, heart."

"That's right, you _should_ be sorry. …Are you—are you laughing at me?! You are! You bastard! I got it right in the teeth and you're laughing at me! Evvvannnnnnnnn!"

"Oi, Spike?"

"Haaaaate yoooooouuuu…."

"Light of my socks, nutmeg in my coffee, emerald of my cheese board, blackberry in my tea?"

"Good god. What."

"Do you know what time it is, if my NEWT in astronomy doesn't grossly mislead me?"

"Hmm. Could you mean Go To Sleep You Sodding Ungrateful Whinger AM?"

"Spot on, Class Act."

"…Actually, nutmeg in the coffee might be interesting."

"…O Hallowed Death, take me now."

"Ev?"

"Mm?"

"He's not here."

"…Who isn't?"

"Death."

"Oh? S'pose you'd better fill in, then."

"…Ev?"

"In your own time, maestro."

"Are we still partners?"

Evan shot bolt upright, and so did his eyebrows. "What kind of question is that?" he demanded, his lazy, cozy anticipation shattered.

"I…" Severus wasn't meeting his eyes. "There may be things I'm not allowed to talk about, going forward, and…" He smiled humorlessly. "I don't know what you need me for, now we're out of school, that you couldn't get from an elf and an accountant."

"I cannot possibly be hearing this," Evan explained to himself out loud, voice flat with disbelief. "It's hallucinations brought on by _lack of sleep_."

"I don't think you _should_ have done it," Severus said, ignoring him. "Set a flea in his ear, however you did it. But it was easy for you, wasn't it? No trouble. I wouldn't have dared if I'd known where to start, and that's nothing new, but you hardly need someone to chivvy firsties back to bed for you, these days, or any tutoring, or help with menacing morons who won't hear a word to the wise, and I—"

"Severus Octavian Seth Prince-Snape," Evan clipped out, voice frozen with fury, "you are _not_ getting one over again tonight—"

"That was your idea."

"—and if I ever hear such utter rot from you again, you'll wish I'd stopped at slapping you down—or up, sidewise, or perpendicular. Did he curse you stupid? You raise my hands this instant."

He glared until his hesitating flatmate gave in, raised his eyes heavenward, indulgently, and lifted the potion-stained appendages Severus knew perfectly well he meant. "Do you think you get to take them back just because I don't have a project on right this very moment? I don't remember saying I was done with them; did I say anything remotely like that?"

"S'pose not," Severus admitted, with a grave, almost wistful look. It would have translated to something revoltingly soppy on another face. He added, with a little more of the gleam Evan liked to see, "You're far too lazy."

"I'm sorry, it can't possibly be that you were trying to talk from over all the way over there," he stormed on, with a cutting gesture. "Do you need to be reminded where your voice lives?"

With a somber expression that was very nearly a smile, Severus leaned over and dropped a soft, certain kiss at the hollow of Evan's throat.

"Are we still partners," he repeated scathingly, dripping mockery. His hand (one of the broader, paint-stained ones, not one of the brewing-strengthened set with the long, tapering, knuckley fingers) clenched convulsively, possessively, in the hair at the nape of the idiot's neck, so fine it hung limp even at summer's most humid.

No one else, now they were out of the Slytherin dorms, ever got to see the unpleasant sheen of Spike's splash-fume-and-hex shield washed off bone china skin and inked-silk hair at the end of his brewing day. After all, he even ran back to the stillroom after night parties. Knew he was going to. Planned to. Who did he think would paint him his proper puppyishly swotty instead of brazenly offensive if Evan didn't do it? No one, that's who _._

And who would keep Evan from drifting off to sleep and dying of numb boredom without a tempest settled cozily in his lap to shield and stir him? Bella if anyone, and dying of numb boredom would be preferable to her kind of excitement.

But you couldn't tell Spike the things he did for you weren't the things he did for you on purpose, weren't the things that cost him anything, or that he had to think about. That wasn't something he could take in, even when you both knew the reverse was true. Even if having things done for him on purpose actually upset him. Even if, like Evan, you wore his very own words on your arm, an image inked in tiny runes like brushstrokes, so that neither of you could be in danger of forgetting you were _the still place, the balance, the hearth_. He'd think you were making fun of him, and the harder you tried to make him believe you meant it, the less good-humored his disbelief would become.

Even so. Even considering his idiot himness.

 _Were they still partners_. "Unbesoddinglievable."

" _Verzeihung bitte, Herr Schwartzrosiger_ ," Severus apologized with deep (and deeply insincere) formality into Evan's collarbones. A tiny smile tugged just at the corners of his eyes when he raised his head. He laid himself flat with an arm out: a clear invitation for Evan to pound him into shape like the lumpy pillow he was before settling down on him for the night.

Opting for Latin, Evan simmered, " _Asine,_ " and took him up on the unspoken offer with enough force to make sure his _dunderkopf_ wouldn't forget the lesson all _week._ And also with a cushioning charm, because why should Ev suffer?

He felt much calmer in the morning. Especially since, for a wonder, one strong hand was still curled over his back and another warm at his nape, even though the sunlight was already glowing blue through their innermost curtains. All told, he considered, he'd handled that particular little unjustified panic attack very well. There wasn't even any crockery to reparo this time, and he'd only said no-more to last night, hadn't made any announcements about what Severus could or couldn't expect in the morning.

And he'd made quite a point of how Severus's hands were his to do as he liked with, hadn't he? Which Severus hadn't argued with him about, so he really _had_ to underline and secure his position before Severus woke up and had some coffee and got unmuzzy and truculent. Stir while the cauldron's hot and all. It wasn't particularly that he'd been cursing himself for cutting off the possibility of sucking Spike's fingers ever since he'd done it. It was purely a matter of tactics. He had to cement his point, unless he wanted to lose the high ground, by doing exactly what he wanted to with _his own_ hands and make _his own_ voice do what he wanted it to before Spike was awake to have a say in the matter.

Right.

Spike was careful not to let his hands get calloused: he needed sensitivity for judging temperatures and for measuring ingredient mass and quality. Or at least that was his excuse, and Evan wasn't calling him on it. Not when it meant he went as mad over a determined mouth on them as on less public places, not the way Ev felt about them.

He blinked. He was quite sure the bed, and Severus, had both been under his front a second ago. Now one of those hands was splayed lightly over his throat, not threatening, just warm, one finger tapping lightly. "My voice, I believe you said?" Severus inquired mildly from somewhere near his chin, dark and a bit raspy with sleep, like black volcanic sand at the side of a hot spring.

"Now you're getting it," Evan agreed happily, and snuggled into back the pillows to be used.

Still, it was an object lesson in speak-of-the-devil. Hadn't he let his thoughts stray to this very potential disaster only last week? Are we still partners, full and equal allies? Are you carrying me? Unacceptable. Clearly he should leave the pessimism and catastrophe-preparation to Spike, who you couldn't stop being braced for _absolutely everything all the time_ even with tranquilizing potions and a foot rub. Not even the universe could arrange for that many devils to come when called.

And Evan knew exactly why that was, didn't he.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Verzeihung bitte, Herr Schwartzrosiger_ : Please forgive me, Mr. Black-Rosier (Black-Pinker, technically. :D )  
>  _Asine_ : Ass. The four-legged kind.  
>  _Dunderkopf_ : Foam/yeast-for-brains/dregs-head. Dunder being a Thing in rum-making. It's foamy and yeasty and is used in the process but is also a by-product of an earlier step, and can be used as fertilizer.
> 
> Turns out dunder may, in Northern England, be a fluffy _textile_ product. Which is one more data point in favor of Spinner's Row being in a (failing) mill town around there. I want to spin idle speculations about whether the cotton fluff was named for the rum foam, but they'd just be that. I can say for sure, though, that Severus knows both meanings of the both word, Evan vaguely suspects it means something like sound-and-fury (thunder, see?), and I'm just relieved Professor Snape wasn't calling his students something more organically rude.
> 
>  **Re 'thorn'** : Evan's last name leaves him with exactly two thematic choices unless he decides he's interesting enough to use his imagination on (unlikely). Also, there's this family spell, see _A Key Called Promise_ , ch 8.


	8. Spinner's End, Nelson, Lancashire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A brief interlude in which Eileen fends off a moderately-domesticated pit viper.

"Be off with you," Eileen said crossly to the beautiful boy on her doorstep, folding her arms.

"I just want a word with your husband, ma'am, mayn't I wait for him?" Rosier cajoled, giving her a very accomplished set of puppy eyes.

"Circe," she cursed in disgust, "what's the boy done now?"

"He's being a flailing jackass with all the self-esteem of a salted flobberworm. Again," her son's pet viper told her baldly, his dreamy blue eyes almost hard for a moment before he coaxed, "Won't you let me thank the source?"

"You can't come round here every time Severus has one of his nervy fits," she said, eying him with impatient disfavor and tightening her arms.

He blinked at her ingenuously, asking, "Whyever not?"

Because the visits reminded Toby that magic existed, and of everything he blamed on lacking the power of his wife's birthright. And then he'd brood over everything about his son he couldn't bear to (or just couldn't) tell the other parochial, poverty-stricken pub-crawlers about. The wand, and the 'effeminate' long hair and bookishness and poncy posh research job and, most of all, the conspicuous lack of wife or girlfriend.

People unhappy with their lives could always be trusted to find something perfectly normal to decide was dreadful and look down on. Muggles without money were so helpless, they were the worst of the lot, she'd found, and the strictest with their own. The rich ones, at least, could call nearly anything an eccentricity and get away with it.

So he'd brood and simmer and fume, and then he'd go out and get as drunk and ham-fisted as he'd used to when Severus had been living at home. It had gotten so bad she'd never replaced her wand after Toby'd burned it; better to take the cauldron off the heat than be forever flicking cooling charms at it. And where would this fine young fellow be, with his brocaded waistcoat and red-gold curls, once he'd jabbed hot pins into her man's brain and sauntered off?

"Because it's a nuisance, that's why not, and I won't be having with it."

Rosier sighed elaborately, and looked at her very sadly. She had the crawling feeling he'd followed her thoughts without even going into her head, which was bad enough when her own lad did it. "Oh, all right, then. Anything for peace, me. Only, let it _be_ peace. I should be so sorry to find there'd been any unpleasant notes or anything of that sort."

Not a flicker of the chill that slammed down Eileen's spine made to her face. "I'll keep it in mind if the old goat ever learns his letters," she said, briskly unfair. Toby was as bad about books as their boy was, in his own way and on the sly, but being rude about someone an angry person disliked was the fastest way to make them feel you were on the same side. "Now, shove off. I've a client coming, and I can't have a man loitering about."

Calling Lizzy Eccles from down the street a 'client' was stretching it a bit. She would come in distress, though, and leave with some tea or mead that would do her more good than even a muggle who knew herblore would expect. And in the next week or so she'd probably drop by with a box of 'extra' eggs or a pie that 'wasn't good enough for the company she'd planned it for' or some such. Close enough, then, and it was a word a Londoner would understand.

"Right you are," Rosier said amiably, touching a finger to an imaginary hat. "Do give my very best regards to Blunt Force Trauma Senior, won't you?"

"Not likely," Eileen snorted, and shut the door firmly in the lie of his angel's face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was prompted by reader response (at ffnet, but there were good points made anyway) to give you some making-of notes, so:
> 
>  **Time** : _This story was written before the prequels_. II've said that in prequel notes, but now you may see more why it matters. They were written for two reasons. First, Evan was kind of two-dimensionally foppish here and I needed to get into his head (the void looks back into yooooouuuuu).
> 
> Second, there were enormous parenthetical blocks of flashbacky musings interfering with the flow. I thought maybe they could have their own home. Then most of them stayed regardless, because the prequel (taken as a whole) got NANO-length. While I hope people will read it/them anyway, Valley should be capable of standing on its own. Is it? I don't know. It tries.
> 
> So, yes, there is some expository backstory. Occupational hazard of sequels. If those who'll recognize it when you see it could be patient with that, knowing it's there so newcomers aren't lost (and because I, er, really do not assume people memorize my very long fluff!), it would be graceful and appreciated.
> 
>  **Structure** : I know those of you who have read them are used to longer, denser chapters from me, where a lot happens at once. Or seems to, because one chapter can cover weeks at a time and dorm life feels that way compared to postgrad. They were intensely located: one place, one mind. This one isn't like that. It's ensemble, or at least much closer to it. You get a broader view. Also a slower build, with some getting-to-know-you. I realize getting to know Ev and Spike is, for old hands, old hat, but, again...


	9. Harrows, Londonderry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lily attempts to ride herd on a prancing stag.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** worse location-wordplay than Diagon Alley, and a complete lack of vitriol. Everyone in this story is an unreliable narrator (naif style) and sees the world, other people, and themselves from their own point of view. Yes, that was a necessary warning for this chapter; some readers will like the next chapter's take on these characters better.

"James."

"Sunblossom!"

"James, I want you to listen very carefully."

"I shall treasure every word that falls from your pouting—no, wait, I don't mean pouting, let me think. Every word that shoots from your cupid's bow, how's that? No. Dreadful, that's what that is. I can do better, half a mo."

"JAMES CHARLES POTTER I DO NOT CARE WHAT COLOR THE CARPET IS, ALL RIGHT?"

"But this one has nifflers on it, and this one has snitches! Obviously the snitches are infinitely superior, but call this," he pointed disdainfully at the background, "sky-blue? _I_ don't. Queasy, that's what I call it. And what if it's a girl? She might think we only wanted a boy if we have a blue carpet, and get some sort of whatyoumaycallem, complication."

"Complex," Lily said wearily, sitting down on one of the many armchairs about the horrible place. "And how do I know? I'm developing one. That's how."

"Aha! Snog therapy time." James caroled, "Pay attention, everyone! I shall now, for actually not your amusement but no doubt you'll be delighted and edified anyway, snog my wife! It's going to be epic! Tickets at the register!"

"No, no, back off, girls," Lily countered his bounce with a sarcastic drawl, "he's taken." When they'd been younger, he would have shouted that as loudly as the words suggested, and she would have slapped or hexed him and gone off with someone else. Sometimes the miracle in growing up was how small the miracles needed to be to matter enormously.

"Awww, but Lily," he cajoled, leaning in with a fine disregard for the shoppers who'd been close enough to hear. Most of them resembled Lily in silhouette, more or less (and possibly more to the tune of triplets in one case, although that effect might have been sheer contrast with the witch's twigginess), and were about equally divided between giggly and disapproving. "It's our Special Day!"

"Which special day would this be, then?" she asked with mostly-morbid curiosity.

He shrugged carelessly, and suggested, "Thursday?"

"It's Wednesday."

"Oh. Wednesday, then! Sacred to Odin Allfather, who—"

"Was never such a noisy oik in public?"

"Probably not," James agreed, settling on the arm of the chair and flicking his wand lightly without taking it out of its bottomless sheath. The disapproving saleswizard who'd honed in on his abuse of the furniture blinked, stopped advancing, and went back to what he'd been doing. "He'd have been more the bloodshed and mayhem type, Lils. Count your blessings, you should."

She shook her head and leaned back against his broad chest, smiling a little. "Do you know what I'd like, James?"

"Tell me this instant!"

"I'd like to pick a damn carpet, go home, and place it in front of the crib, where you would be allowed to simper dotingly at it for a maximum of ninety seconds, but not to quote-unquote improve it in any way. Then I'd like to have a nice, quiet tea with you—"

James brightened, hoping she meant that in the we're-in-public code sort of way. It wasn't completely out of the question, if he started behaving himself to the point where she'd be pleased to get her hands on him for reasons other than strangulation. Lack of clarity about that sort of thing was, she found, a positively magical motivator.

"—and put in some work on the, you know, the shoe things, before supper."

"You want to help work on the shoe things?!" James exclaimed, an enormous grin taking over his face, like knotweed. "Lily! Seraphim! You're coming around! Wait till I tell Sirius!"

"Not _those_ shoe things," she said, rolling her eyes. "Dream on, Jamie. The next one of those I see is getting binned as a public safety hazard. What on earth do you want them for, anyway? I mean the ones for the Hit Wizard Office commission."

"You're so virtuous," he mourned, smiling. He dropped a kiss on the top of her head. "Positively sick-making. All right, then, petal; pick one and we're off."

"The green shaggy one that's all over ivy," she said at once, getting up and twining her arm through his. She didn't have her heart set on it particularly, and it wasn't even really much less dreadfully cutesy than the rest of them. However, it matched her eyes and at least the charms were realistic, and _she_ was capable of making a decision even when not under pressure. "With the rabbits. Really, sweetheart, by the time the baby knows what it's looking at and likes cuddly, shiny things, it'll be all worn out and time for a new one. We'll be in for it from Mum and your mother if it's not nursery-chic, but it ought to be something _we_ like."

"That's why I wanted the snitches," James explained, but he'd had the chosen carpet under his other arm by the time she'd finished talking. By now they were on their way to the cashier, the occasional long ear, twitchy nose, or cotton tail peeking out from the shaggy roll that matched her eyes, illusory vines twining over his arms.

She squeezed his arm, smiling, and diplomatically commiserated, "I know, love, but you were right: it was an _awful_ blue."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My britpicker explained to me very carefully that British men are not allowed to be the hideous love children of Tony Stark and P.T. Barnum even if they're lunatic ex-Quidditch stars over the moon about having a baby on the way. At least, not in public. That is OOC for nationality. I'm not reminding you of her name here because she absolutely warned me and this chapter is totally not her fault in any way. I am stubborn like rocks about my muses. Not even like pigs. Like rocks. No budgie. No parakeet, either. It's toned down since she saw it, but, still...
> 
> ...the only way I can write this story is if I just sit back and ask the muses, Hey, X, what were you doing at this point? If I try to tell them what to do, I am sooooo sunk. vOv
> 
> So instead it's just Lily who's sunk.
> 
> Also, yes, his father's name was Charlus. Charlus Potter, we understand, was relatively old when he was born—which could mean anything from 40 to 140, once we remember oh-maths and that potions exist. We can assume Charlus was nice to him, because he was one spoiled kid, and that he was raised to be a blood-traitor, because he showed unconflicted certainty about his beliefs, in contrast to Sirius's fraught rebellion. His middle name is Charles, I say, and won't raise eyebrows in either world.


	10. St. Mungo's, London

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narcissa tries to decide whether shaking or strangling Severus is more likely to make him stop cackling in righteous schadenfreude and start being helpful.

"Do I look as blown up as all that?" Narcissa asked. Sounding playfully mournful instead of homicidal was exceedingly difficult: every time the irritating man tried to say something, he dissolved into laughter again.

This time, probably because he had a very well-developed danger sense, Severus just about managed a, "N-not _you,_ " before he folded up again, very nearly crying with it.

Narcissa sighed with emphasis, and said, "Severus, darling, I don't mean to be an imposition, but as you _will_ insist on doing this here, and we haven't long before you have to trot back to your little lab…"

Severus waved an apologetic hand and made a more concerted effort to pull himself together. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he said, scrubbing at his eyes and trying to twitch his mouth back into place. "It's just, I saw Potter in the hallway, and…" he didn't quite dissolve again this time, but a few more body-shaking snickers overwhelmed him.

Alarmed, she drew herself up as straight as the beloved-but-inconvenient bulk rearranging her organs would allow, and pressed out furiously, "Severus Snape, you idiot, if you've let that insignificant worm provoke you, _in public in the hospital!_ "

He waved a hand, still grinning like a wicked loon, and assured her "Innocent. I even managed to keep a straight face until he was out of sight."

Mollified, she settled back and remarked, "Gracious. Whatever has happened to the poor man?"

Her favorite hatchet crumpled into glee again, and he said, "There was—Belby wanted me to fetch a new crate of vials before I came to meet you, and when I came back, I saw Potter fixing these floppy things like white footprints in the doorway. So I ducked around the corner—"

"Vision-sharpening spell?" she asked.

Nodding, he said, "And a noise-catching mirror. It's always helpful, when defusing one of his charming surprises, if you can catch anything of the trigger spell." She nodded. She'd stood over his shoulder asking foolproofing questions while he'd developed the mirror charm in the summer before their sixth year, as she often had.

It still made her eyes nostrils flare hotly and Evan's smile turn chilly and worrying when they remembered the weeks of numb, hollow silence, and later the way his hands had shaken all the time, the way he'd choked and turned blind and white-eyed at the most random times and would bite his cheeks until they bled when asked questions. The fit they'd been afraid was a heart attack by the Three Broomsticks, near that horrible shack, the way he'd had to drug himself every day to get through the second half of his OWLs even with the House closing ranks around him. How telling it had been that he'd let them shield him, after years of refusing to be seen in public with anyone he liked, in case it made them targets.

Reggie had been even more in the dark than they were, poor pet. About the month of silence, at least; the appalling business by the beech tree afterwards had been outrageously public, not a secret at all. The silence, though, no one knew what that had been about, not even Evan. Along with everything else that had been going on in Reggie's unhappy house, it had driven him madder and madder until something over there had snapped. After that, his parents hadn't left their new heir any time to think of anything but his summer homework and family responsibilities.

On the other hand, Lucius had obviously quite enjoyed swooping in with a summer post and library and stable access and potions commissions and invitations for Severus to join his private dueling lessons. His suave-and-sophisticated-rescuer attitude had been entirely laughable, and he hadn't in any way succeeded in pulling a veil over the several things he'd wanted out of it.

And that had mattered. Narcissa had thought about that very hard, even after Bella started teasing her about frown lines.

But he'd genuinely wanted to help as well as to earn credit, and one of the things he'd been trying so hard to gain was Narcissa's good opinion. That mattered, too. And even if he'd been grandiose about it, he'd evaluated the target and the situation accurately. The measures he'd taken had been of significant help, both morale-related and practical, and impeccably timed. And that wasn't only a point in his favor, but a talent that was vanishingly rare.

And he did have such talented hands.

Now, Severus had covered his face with his own talented hand, black eyes shining at her from between his fingers in hapless delight. "And when he got up to leave, they, they, Narcissa, they popped up and turned into these big, hobnailed boots, and there was this sort of rubber-ball-and-chittering noise, and…"

Words failing him, he resorted to a series of expressive gestures. This time she joined him, giggling musically (if she did say so herself) behind her hand. Potter was a good-looking man, and he looked his best, in her opinion, hoist very high on his own petard with his own enchanted shoelaces.

"It was _beautiful,"_ he concluded blissfully. They basked together in the lovely, lovely thought of the strutting bastard trying to explain himself to draconic old Evangeline Vance in Spell Damage. She had no sense of humor at all. Furthermore, according to Lucius, she had some unspecified grudge against wizards, especially young ones, who were involved with witches. Vance was as likely as not to send him home to his self-righteous little chit of a wife, still bruised and chewed on all over (by _footless shoes!)_ and with a jarvey in his ear.

The ginger cow was, in Narcissa's opinion (which she was careful never to voice to Severus. He only pretended to be rational on the subject, poor dear), entirely useless as a human being. This might be explained by her filthy blood, but was not excused by it. It could at least be said for her, however, that she'd never once found Potter's malicious little pranks acceptable. Not even when she trying-to-be-secretly thought they were funny.

And she was nearly as far along as Narcissa, by all accounts. Even Narcissa would admit that the combination of hormonal upsets and physical discomfort could make a girl just a tiny, teeny little bit less serene than usual. If Vance sent the infantile bully home to a less than usually stable wife, still covered in the fallout of his vicious folly, just _imagine!_

"Well." Severus allowed himself one final, happy sigh before pulling his business face on. "How are you and the tadpole getting on?"

"I should quite like to hold him in my _arms,_ " she said, with a plaintive smile. "Tomorrow, if at all possible. This very minute would also be acceptable."

"I imagine so," he said, with an expression that said he absolutely could not understand why witches wanted to put themselves through what she'd once overheard him calling Self-Induced Parasitic Distortion Hell.

But the lovely thing about Severus was that while he'd gag and make faces, make snide, awful comments, make no bones about how incomprehensible and odd he thought you were (talk about kettles and cauldrons!), none of it ever mattered in the least. Unless you took him seriously, took offense, and ruffled his sensitive little feathers, of course. But who was that oblivious (or bored)? And even then it wouldn't matter once the bludger hit the bat.

"I wish you'd let an actual healer take a look at you," he said, running his softly-glowing wand over her head and torso. He frowned at it, honing in on whatever information the color, luminosity, and wand-feel were giving him, but it was only a concentrating sort of frown. No cause for concern.

"You say that every time," she said fondly.

"I mean it every time," he retorted, even though they'd been exactly no help and he knew it. Her traitor body had rejected three attempts (it was easier to think of them as 'attempts') before he'd looked at her leaden attempt at a smile and hesitatingly offered to do a little reading-up.

The almost bruising euphoria of the first disgusting draught he'd pushed on her had made Lucius coax her into going into social seclusion for a few months. The second had given her obsessive addictions to sunlight and moonlight and the scents of loam and surf. Together, they made two birds easily stoned by long visits to the seaside and the raising-up of a hedge maze she was quite proud of. She was still taking them, but the odd effects had worn off several weeks ago.

Bizarre though Severus's treatments sometimes were, the baby had caught and this one had held on. Clearly, he was onto something so brilliantly twisted no one else could catch a glimpse of it without eating odd mushrooms and listening to fwooper cries. As usual.

He could fuss all he liked about midwifery not being his field and how important it was to meet for this near his lab, so he could take her down to the so-called experts if he found a problem. Narcissa knew the difference between quality and dross. She had no intention of wasting her time or risk her baby on Ministry-approved hacks just because they happened to have taken the particular medimagic classes (womblore and bedside manner) he happened to feel shaky in. He'd read everything they had by now, she was sure of it, and if he'd had access to a living teacher he would have been making fun of the poor thing by the third class.

"Still no side effects from the Devil's Bit preparation?"

"I don't think so," she said hesitatingly.

When Severus asked you a question like that, hesitation was fatal. It was almost certain to result in being exhaustively grilled for, at minimum, five or six tedious minutes. And when he was finally satisfied, naturally there were more questions.

In the end, though, he told her with reassuring callousness that she'd just have to live with the disturbing unpleasantnesses that had been intruding on her life. Like needing the toilet fifty times a day. Just like (according to both his research and his village-witch mother) _every other upright-walking female who'd ever attempted her insane experiment since there was such a thing as an upright-walking female. Er, possibly excepting birds. So just all the hairy ones._

"Severus Octavian Snape," she giggled, "I am no such thing!"

"You have more hair than I do."

"…That seems so unlikely, my dear _man._ "

Heartened by his heartlessness and absurd tangents, she let him walk her back to the floo. On the way, she learned only a little more than she was interested to know about the precautions that wise (meaning paranoid) brewers took to avoid overheating and inadvisable particles clinging to the skin.

She was quite pleased about it, really; he was getting much better at filtering unnecessary and inappropriate details out of his chatty little impromptu lectures. And she now had lovely new imagery to share with Lucius and tease Evan about.

He shouldn't have escorted her, and possibly she shouldn't have allowed him. It would make him late—or rather, even later—getting back to Belby, she knew. He could be gallant like that, though, so long as no one embarrassed him by remarking on it, and would go surly if one did whether he was thanked or dissuaded. Besides, she had one indispensable duty to discharge before leaving him. It was one no friend would fail at.

The fire green with powder and her destination set, she turned to him mischievously, in the second before stepping through, and declared, "Boots!"


	11. Still St. Mungo's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remus isn't even trying to get the Wolfsbane potion anymore, but he'll even be polite to Ol' Black-Hole Eyes if it might help him find a missing girl who hasn't even made it to her first full moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : brooding over the lycanthropic oral fixation. Just brooding, though; all bitiness is in the past.
> 
>  **Reminder** : the narrators know what they (think they) know and think what they think. Please consider the possibility that a given POV character might have been wrong, misinformed, or even lying before determining that it's the storyline/continuity that's inconsistent. Yes, I'm saying that now because Remus is ill-informed and drawing wrong conclusions and you're probably going to notice.

Remus! Back again?"

"Back again, Raj," Remus agreed ruefully, shaking hands with his former senior-prefect. He noticed a new face about the lab. "Oh, hullo! You're… no, wait… it's Chang, isn't it? You were a year below me, I think?"

"Chang as was," Ranjit said, when the witch only dipped her head with a smile. "She's gone and married Dr. Strangelove."

"I don't remember seeing that in the Prophet!" Remus exclaimed. Mingyay, that was her name, he thought. Ravenclaw.

Mingyay dimpled at him absently, and said in a low, musical voice, "Phil won't have anything to do with the Prophet. It was in his own paper, of course."

"Oh, of course," Remus said, trying to look as if he read the thing or even remembered its name.

"Yes," Mingyay said. He had the distinct impression she was answering his ignorance rather than his words.

"Well, congratulations, Mrs. Lovegood," he said gamely. The woman had to be insane, choosing to marry Xenophilius and work with Snape. Anyone new at the Wolfsbane Project (awful name, but it was the key ingredient... and made some of the more sadistic bureaucrats happy) was a gift horse, though.

"Please, call me Ming," she replied.

"Well, if you're sure…"

"Quite sure, Mr. Lupin," Ming smiled. "No one with such a distinguished nose can say Míngyùe* at all well."

He fingered his unremarkable nose. He wouldn't have called it distinguished, but his entire face was positively Roman compared to the soft curves of her own. "I see," he smiled. "And I'm Remus. When did you start working here, Ming?"

"Oh, Mingaling's still got the shine on," Raj said, dropping a friendly arm around her shoulders.

"Ranjit makes terrible puns," Ming said gravely, to Remus's complete lack of comprehension. "But yes, it's so. Snape made me promise last year to find out whether I wanted to work here, once Phil and I were settled. It seemed like interesting work, and so I came."

"You know Snape?"

"He wants to read the old Chinese herbals," she said replied. "The Shennong Bencao and so on. When he first began to study the Asian runes, he needed someone nearer by to help him."

"You tutored _Snape?_ " Remus asked, a little awestruck. As far as he knew, Snape had never been on the receiving end of the tutor's stick. Not even in Transfiguration (as far as Remus knew), where he'd always seemed to be working harder than he usually had to, to make things come right.

She smiled gently, and said, "Professor Slughorn introduced him to my grandmother, so of course he could not escape tea. I think it was a relief to him to have someone there to talk potions with. But what is your interest in the project, Remus?"

"Oh, well, er," Ranjit, bless the man, was starting to flounder for him when a deep voice drawled suddenly from _right_ between his shoulders, _Merlin,_ making him jump.

"An excellent question, Lovegood. Lupin, didn't I tell you last time if I ever caught you wheedling around here again I'd chase you out with a pitchfork?"

"I believe you did, Severus," Remus said mildly, pulling on his special, polite, talking-to-Snape face. He didn't point out that Snape hadn't specified that the pitchfork would be silver, and could therefore be assumed not to have meant it much. Ming wouldn't know about his curse already. Unless Snape changed his mind and let Remus into the project (ha), she wasn't going to. "But I wanted to speak to someone at the project on another matter."

Snape made a skeptical noise, but said curtly, "Fine. In my office."

Remus followed the lean back and its trail of woody, herbal scent into the depressingly familiar office. He wondered whether Snape _ever_ wore anything but wet-stone colors. Put the man up against the wall into Diagon, and he'd look like he was wearing Jamie's cloak with the hood down.

The office itself wasn't bad; all the rooms in St. Mungo's and the Ministry had airy enchanted windows on at least one wall, even if the other side of said wall was actually a broom cupboard. An expensive bit of magic, but anything to keep everyone at their desks. The walls were a pale, cloudlike blue that always made Remus feel swimmy, and there were some quite interesting illuminations on the wall in various languages, some of which he knew Snape spoke, or at least could read.

He hated it anyway. He must have been in here fifteen times, trying to persuade Snape to let him sign on to help test the potion. He knew they were still having problems with side effects, but he felt like a parasite and a coward, not being as much help as he could with something that was meant to help him.

But Snape kept listening to him reason and plead (or at least kept his eyes mostly open while he napped until Remus was done; hard to tell), and then fixing him an impatient glare and droning things like, "What were your NEWT scores, Lupin? Oh, you earned some? Get out." And "Describe your wand, Lupin. Yes, I thought you could, because you have one. What a nice resource for you. Goodbye." And, "Do you have a roof at night? A way of bathing and doing laundry that would allow you to show up at job interviews without reeking of unwashed werewolf? I see. The door is behind you." Most recently it had been, "Lupin, do—you—understand—words—spoken—in—English? How _delightful_ for you: you still have half a brain to fry. Stop badgering me or I'll take out a restraining order. With a pitchfork."

Remus supposed it was sort of sweet that the project was rejecting test subjects that weren't already sleeping under bridges and getting all their calories out of bottles, or living rough in some forest or other. It made him feel absolutely foul, though. More, although it might be self-centered, he couldn't quite get past the feeling that Snape was refusing him this, something that would make him safe to be out of his cage every month, largely out of spite.

He hadn't let his friends take him running since '76, when waking to silver-burns around his mouth had made him face the sheer enormity of the risks they'd been taking. It mattered for at least a week after the Full how thwarted his moon-maddened changeling-self had felt, and staying in the Shack was only moderately better than being caged. When no one could make it, or only Pete could, he sometimes wasn't fully healed until the next time. Soon Prongs was going to have a baby to keep him home, too. Padfoot was good company, but he wasn't _the whole pack_. Anyway, Remus didn't want to have to rely on Frivolous Black being reliable every month for the rest of their lives.

The Ministry's changing cells would give him company, but only his family and friends and a few of the teachers knew what he was, among the uncursed and outside the Project. He hadn't been able to find independent work as it was, and what if Jamie got fed up with funding their little company? Marauder's Moon products were a hit at the DMLE and with the Order, but those were limited markets that usually got charged reduced prices. The joke line wasn't doing as well. Oh, Zonko's kept them in stock, but didn't run out nearly as fast as Jamie and Sirius had confidently expected. They were almost always in the red. He'd get a glowing reference, of course, but _grows hair and cannibalism regularly_ wasn't a job skill in high demand. Not with anyone he'd care to work with.

No, he had to keep off their radar. Even coming here was a risk, but he couldn't live with himself if he didn't try. Ranjit and Belby wouldn't give him away, though, and Snape (thank Merlin and Dumbledore) couldn't. Remus thought he (probably) wouldn't have anyway, honestly. But it was best to have insurance, and Severus had only been anything _like_ Remus's friend for a few eggshell months before he'd somehow gotten too much information out of Sirius. Cunningly, Sirius insisted, although Severus had taken a poker-faced, commiseratingly unsympathetic I-won't-pry-if-you-don't attitude to the monthly 'sicknesses.'

Remus had barely felt he knew Severus even then, although he'd picked up enough to have a vague and uncomfortable idea about why he'd stayed at school that winter. He certainly didn't know Snape now, except that ceasing to be prey had only made his snappishness more coherent, hadn't eased it. Or his contempt. Which wasn't fair, because although Sirius was definitely hedging about what had happened, he hadn't been lying about its having been an accident. Remus knew when Siri was lying, didn't even need enhanced senses.

But those two never gave each other the benefit of any doubt, and Remus wouldn't have felt inclined to be fair to the mercenary bastard who'd bitten _him_. He certainly wouldn't have sat quietly (if irritably) in a room alone with Greyback with nothing but a desk between them and asked what the stinking hyena wanted.

"What, then?" Snape asked, drumming his long fingers on the desk. He looked as though he was trying to do too much. Remus thought he might be a little bonier than usual, and there was the kind of smudgy bruising under his eyes that one got from neglecting sleep rather than annoying people with quick tempers.

"There's a girl gone missing," Remus said. "Last seen a little over a week ago. I met her and her parents last time I came here, in the waiting room. I'm the only wizard they know who isn't assigned to their case. They asked me to ask around, and I know she wants to be in the study, too, so—"

"So you felt a kinship with a young idiot as self-destructively mental as you are?" Snape finished for him helpfully, turning around with tight, disdainful lips to pull a mug off a shelf behind him. He tapped its rim, and it filled with water.

"So I came by to ask if she'd been in," Remus said patiently as Snape drank. The cup stayed up in front of his thin mouth. It left only the beaky proboscis and black eyes visible, heavy-lidded with distance and distaste. "Her mum said she was worried about the transformations ruining her hands, so we thought she might still come by to try again here even if she wanted to get away from home for a while."

"Her hands," Snape repeated, eyes dropping broodingly to his own fingers.

He was silent for a long moment, during which Remus swallowed down the fervent desire to try telling him just one more time that he'd never had anything to do with Sirius's fit of whatever that had been. That he was, speaking personally, extremely _glad_ that Snape had escaped without more than a clawing and dented gauntlets (no one had ever explained those to Remus. Sirius had tried to say Snape's wearing silver armor to the Willow proved he'd been after proof of Moony's secret, but he'd reeked of guilt. Remus was heartstoppingly glad Snape had had them, whatever the reason and despite how _incredibly_ unpleasant that rash had made eating and talking for weeks), and wouldn't have to worry about things like that and worse.

He'd tried before. It never did any good. Quite the contrary. Reminding Snape about that night was always a very loud disaster.

"I think I do remember a girl fussing over her fingers," Snape said after a long, frowning moment. Maybe Remus had misunderstood his silence. He always smelled edgy and intense under his very herbal soap; it was only a matter of degree. That and eyes so dark Remus couldn't see the pupils made him hard to read. "Blonde, muggle before the curse, bitten very recently, still at school? Musical." Remus nodded. "I haven't seen her here since she applied. Do you know her name?" Remus opened his mouth to give it, but Snape waved him silent. If he'd been anyone else, Remus would have called the motion too hasty, but from Snape it was, of course, just impatiently imperious. "Don't tell _me;_ I've already told you all I can. But feel free to ask the others; I hardly pour tea and sit down for a heart-to-heart with every lost werelamb that bleats its way lostly through the door."

Remus believed him. Without reservation.

Snape went on, "Being rather busy. On the subject of which, I have some proposals to screen."

It was a dismissal, and Remus got up. He also, though, curiously asked, "Proposals?"

"Proposed variations on the potion to screen for problematic interactions," Snape elaborated, with a bored shrug. He stood, too, in baseline politeness, but didn't make any move to see Remus out. "Lovegood's an inexhaustible garden of ideas, but she isn't very discriminate about them. I'm not risking my third pair of hands letting Belby see some of these." He shuddered a little.

"I see. Well, goodbye, Severus." He shook his head slightly as Snape waved an absent hand at him and, sitting, bent to his work. That had been downright civil, for Snape, but it would still be a relief and a pleasure to go down the hall into warmer company.

"Lupin!"

Remus turned, privately cursing. He'd been _so close_ to getting out without a quarrel.

Snape was looking indecisive, in a way that would have spelled Really Big Trouble on Sirius or James's faces, although not the especially nasty kind. He tapped his fingertips rapidly on the desk again, and said, "You like things quiet. Peaceful, that is."

"Er… yes?"

Some more finger-tapping. "Were you planning to mention to anyone that you came by today?"

"Is there a problem, Severus?"

Snape appeared to come to a decision. He gave a little grimace and the wickedness went out of his eyes, chased off by a sardonic _look oh look how adult I'm being_ expression. "That's down to you. There probably will be, if Potter finds out that you were here today at about this time and I wasn't already in the office when you arrived."

Alarmed, Remus asked, "What have you done?"

Snape looked at him for a long moment, mouth twisted in bitter amusement. "What do they say about assumptions, Lupin? I saw him publicly embarrass himself. That's what I've done. He doesn't know it—thus far. So: as to whether there'll be trouble, it's entirely your decision."

Remus blanched. "I won't say a _word,_ " he said fervently.

"Won't deny I'm just as pleased," Snape said, turning back to his work. "It'd be a toss-up whether the building would survive, although one might hope for an interceding apoplectic stroke." It was as close to a thank you as Remus had gotten from him since the end of '75. That had been a Christmas like one of those nested balls of carved ivory: a beautiful, fragile, soap-bubble impossibility that had made the following spring even more of a Bludger to the balls by contrast, undoubtedly for them both.

Then he made a noise like he was grinding teeth that were in his throat, and demanded of no one in particular, " _Fenugreek and clauricorn bicuspid?!_ Does she want to turn you all _weightless?!_ "

Remus fled.

Questioning revealed that Ming did, indeed, want to turn them all weightless. She thought that nullifying gravity's pull might ease some of the soft-tissue tearing a transforming body was put through. Remus didn't think it was nearly as bad an idea as it was silly, and might even be a good one. He'd let her have the joy of explaining it to her senior apprentice, though.

And no one else had seen Claire since she'd been turned down as a test subject, either.

 

* * *

*明月 = Míngyùe = bright moon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Those of you who've read the backstory know that Chang (as was) is downplaying her history with Severus to the Marauder. It's hardly his business, and besides, it's more graceful not to sabotage people's chances to prove they've grown up, she feels.
> 
> Having been asked why Luna looks like she does if she's that closely related to Cho: I had the idea in the first place because of her 'bulging' eyes (Harry does not think about how people look in flattering terms. You look normal with maybe a hair color and height or you have bushy hair and buckteeth or a pointy chin or whatever. I blame Petunia). There's a certain Asian eye-phenotype that would look out-of-place enough to be remarked on in a mostly Western-looking face. 
> 
> While there's also a more English type of eye that could be described that way (Xeno may have it, although he may also just goggle at everything very hard, with Lamarckian effect), the people I've seen with the latter haven't had eyes that I personally would have called anything so dramatic as bulging while they were still kids. Also, the Asian-derived type of convex eyes might, I thought, be more noticeable to someone who grew up somewhere as whitebread as I assume Privet Drive is. Maybe it's just that I imagine Petunia with big goggle-eyes to go with her craning-over-garden-fences neck, and feel Harry wouldn't notice eyes like hers as unusual—although he might notice them as unpleasant.
> 
> Luna has Xeno's hair, blond having dominance over black. The genetics might not work quite that simply for muggles, but Xeno has what looks like (less tidy) Malfoy hair, which seems to be as dominant as Weasley/Prewett red among wizards. I really don't think coloration works exactly the same way for them. We've got four major characters with green eyes (Lily, Harry, Minerva, and Horace), which is a pretty high concentration of green-eyed people for a relatively small population. And then there is the whole Harry's Hair Acts Like James Wanted His To thing.


	12. Diagon Alley, London

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neurotic cat is neurotic. 
> 
> Or: Regulus might gripe less about advancing the plot if someone would tell him what this tedious nonsense is _for_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : more sibling rivalry than there are siblings. Which is the root cause of the nickname-overuse. Also, more nastiness than the narrator is aware of.
> 
>  **Hopefully unnecessary extra disclaimer** : while I trust it's generally understood that the characters' opinions don't necessarily reflect the author's, I'm just going to underline it since today's narrator was a Seeker at school and considered being aerodynamic important. Also, he grew up in a family of beautiful people, and the ones he's closest to are aesthetes. Reasons may not excuse, but they do cause when not prevented.
> 
> AKA: Regulus is, among other things, a BMI snob.

Reg was having one of his periodic bouts of Understanding Sirius. They always made him uncomfortable—well, all right, that wasn't quite the thing. To be exact, they gave him the screaming willies. He didn't have to imagine what Mother would say if she noticed him being sympathetic. He'd heard it all. She couldn't possibly have kept anything back.

Surely. Probably. Right?

Thus the terror.

It was, he reflected gloomily, not in the least Spike's fault. Er, not much. A bit his fault. Well, a lot his fault, but in the same way that a salamander would _massively contribute_ to the explosion if an erumpent gored it. There would have been an explosion whatever the thing gored, though, and if it was an erumpent, it was going to gore something. Common knowledge.

Whereas almost no one knew (ta, Bast) what happened if you stabbed a salamander. Let be, they hummed along placidly in their fire-pits, keeping the cupboards above them cold, or being petted and happily exploited by worshipfully grateful fire brigades in dragonhide gloves. Nobody ever had to find out what they could do, if they were only left alone.

Similarly, not really Spike's fault, or at least not something he wanted, but nearly all about him all the same. Reg had never seen him and Sirius be close enough to recognize each other without the air between them crackling so hard it snarled. It was as if flint and steel were all chased about with really powerful magnets.

It was, Reg was sure, all about Siri having suspected from day one that Mother would think Severus would have been about fifty times as satisfactory a son as Siri was. It might have died out if he hadn't been a hundred percent right.

Not that Mother had any more _liking or respect_ for Spike than she had for Sirius. She made no bones, though, about approving his efforts to make up for the way the worthless Prince traitor (her words) had ruined him before he was born.

She'd thrown him in Siri's face every chance she'd had. Even people drenched in filth have more understanding than you do, style of thing. Why are you letting that mucky little half-breed show you up at this or that. Some people would kill for your opportunities. At least THAT boy TRIES.

Which was why Reg was sort of understanding Siri right now, and hating Spike a bit. His life was really, really, really not going according to plan.

Not that he'd exactly had a plan, which was something of a sin for a Slytherin. Or at least, he hadn't had a plan beyond keeping up Father's investments and making sure there was always a Black finger in every pie, doing his part to keep the wizarding world quietly chuffing along. Surely that was ambition enough?

But then there'd been Bella making _assumptions_ about how interested everyone else must be in her new obsession. And it was really difficult to disappoint Bella, because she'd gut you with her fingernails and forbid the house elf to fetch help until you were nearly bled out.

And Reg was even worse at saying no to her than most people, because she loved him and he knew it and who could help loving Bella back? She was brilliant and funny and warm and dangerous and charming and willful and beautiful and certain. She was everything a Black ought to be. Just, in her case there was such a _lot_ of the dangerous and willful.

So he'd gone along. There was no workable way not to.

Anyway, he'd gotten Spike to lend him one of his old Muggle primary-school history textbooks once, when he was deciding whether to take the class. The muggles _very obviously_ needed someone to keep them in order. Witch-burnings were the least of it; apparently muggles had been for centuries and still were liable to very enthusiastically kill each other en masse over who was right about religion, and the way they treated their females was extremely short-sighted.

Spike said both those things were really about power, and maybe he was right. Reg knew, though, that things that were 'really about power' were only _really_ only about power at the top levels. The mass of people involved in any movement, or who sat back and let it happen, were liable to believe what they'd been told and resent who they were aimed at. Either way, it would be a good thing for muggles to have more sensible and enlightened people at their reins, who could make them calm down and _think_ without hurting them when they got overexcited.

Too, something really did need to be done about the way mudbloods kept straggling into Hogwarts without the least idea about anything, spreading their bad manners like fads and then raising their own children to be nearly as ignorant as themselves.

But even if there hadn't been anything to agree with, he would have had to go along. He and Spike were the same, there, only it was all closer-to and more personal for Reg. It would have been career suicide for Spike to decline the Mark, too, once invited. But Evan would have done his best for him, and if that had failed, well, there wasn't much holding them in England he—or, rather, _they_ couldn't have taken with them. Between his brewing and Evan's brushwork, they could have managed anywhere even if Evan had been, like Sirius, blasted off the Tapestry and cut off with a knut.

Which he wouldn't have been. Darius Rosier was fervent in the pureblood cause (and the Dark Lord's cause, too) but his family were a coolheaded lot. When they found they disagreed with each other over politics, they didn't fight over it. They didn't collude with each other against whichever sides they supported, either, but they were pleased not to have all their eggs in one basket, and started pre-plotting paths back to respectability for whichever side of the family lost right from the start.

As for Evan's mum, Reg's Aunt Callisto was a Black woman through and through. Politics might be both lucrative and enjoyable, but one's own blood came first. No competition. If the lordlings and little ministers began to give the family difficulty, one banged heads together, or, if necessary, cut them off. No games, no fuss.

Not like Reg's mother. Even though she'd been born a Black, too, her branch of the family was... fervent. That was where Bella got it from. She took after her father more than either of her sisters did, and then took it whole new places.

No, if Ev and Spike had decided to leave when they were asked to join, no one would have hunted them down. Well, not _very_ hard, although try telling Spike that, the twitch. Whereas resisting Bella's enthusiasm under the impression that she would have felt betrayed and gone terrifyingly predictable would have been the last underestimation Reg would ever have made.

She'd protect him from almost anyone, if it occurred to her. No one would go up against her for him, though, except for his parents and his elf. Narcissa and Evan would probably try to talk her down if she needed stopping, but that would be as far as they'd go. She had Narcissa trained not to challenge her to her face, and it wouldn't occur to Evan to do anything active. He was scary-brilliant at setting lethal traps his prey could only trip by being awful… but by then they'd already been awful.

Spike would want to help, but although he might (three days out of five) be just crazy enough to go up against Bella if he thought it would do any good, he wasn't crazy _and_ stupid. He was very good at knowing when horning in would just make things worse later for the person he wanted to help, when he wouldn't be there.

Reg had never asked why. He'd seen how skinny and scraggly Spike was every September on the Hogwarts Express, how stiffly he'd held himself one year, the way he'd kept his arm tucked in his robes once, how he'd kept his face ducked under his hair the whole ride after the last summer he'd spent at home, curled up exhaustedly on Evan's shoulder, and failed not to limp his way to the carriage. You got people like that in Slytherin. You never asked, you never teased, you never sneered. No matter who you were, no matter who they were, no matter what else you might sneer at them about. Not Done. You made yourself convenient or you stayed out of it.

Reggie's cousins would make themselves convenient, but what else could they do? And even Spike, when it came to Reggie and Bella, would have the sense to stay out of it, thank Salazar. He'd know he could only make her more vicious.

And none of this lot of hamstrung allies were in the least appropriate or appealing as bed partners, let alone to think about living with. His own yearmates were all right for a bit of fun, but not reliable. Gildy, for example, was a delight in (very) small doses, but also completely mental and quite possibly a changeling. He only exaggerated his talents to other people, anyway; he wasn't one to lie to himself about his own strength and take on more than he could handle.

The girls had more sense than to so much as say boo to Bella, and Rabastan and Thorfinn had never yet been observed wanting to. She had them completely enthralled. Besides, Bast and Thor were both a bit… excitable, in their ways. Reg had never even really got on with the twins, and _really_ never wanted to sleep with either of them. No real partners to be found anywhere, not like his cousins had.

The one he should have grabbed was Mel Selwyn: tough as nails, plain-dealing and trustworthy and intelligent enough, if not really clever. They'd been a good team as prefects. He'd never have managed to keep order without her backing him up, although she'd never had any ideas of her own. Her family was impeccable, too; his family would have approved the match in an instant.

The trouble was that he'd never been able to make himself _want_ her without a potion, no matter how much he liked her. When she'd gotten married (some Hufflepuff a few years ahead of them, name of Bulstrode. Solid-looking bloke; bred crups and thestrals), Reggie had been thoroughly annoyed at himself both for letting her get away and for being happy for her instead of upset. He should have been able to make himself want such a good match. Instead he kept wanting people as soft or bruised or nervy as he was himself. What good was that to a Black? Reg wasn't getting _anywhere_.

And now Spike (never soft, well past nervy, so far past bruised you had to think of new words for cracked) was getting summoned to private sessions at least three times a week, as far as Reg could make out. Whenever Reg saw him, he looked like a fifth-year in his very first month on the Quidditch team: constantly wrecked from being mercilessly whipped into shape every day and trying to do OWL study at the same time, but not unhappy about it. Focused, certain. Clearly, he'd been chosen for something important.

Whereas Reg didn't even know what he himself was doing. Although his instructions had been specific enough that he'd know what to do even if things went pear-shaped, the whys of it seemed to be need-to-know. Reg, apparently, didn't.

He could imagine, too, what Mother would say if she found out that a Black, and more than that a favored child of her own, was being treated very nearly like a foot soldier. But Bella was all over glowing with pride at him. His assignment must be important, too, even if he wasn't allowed to understand it.

And there was his assignment, speak of the far too useless to be called a devil. Reg sighed quietly to himself, and flicked his wand at the chubby blond. Really, who was still _chubby_ past third year or so? Didn't the walking botch know a single useful charm, or what the library had been for?

As the lump passed down the street, people were pulled to glance at him by Reg's jinx. Lips curled, nostrils flared, eyes jerked away or lingered unpleasantly. Every single face showed it did not like what it saw. He left it on at full strength just till Pettigrew was breathing hard and stealing nervous, upset glances this way and that, and then reduced the intensity and zipped further along ahead.

He brought it to full power again, but only once. Often, but not too close together, he'd been told. The second time, he arranged to be coming out of Fortesque's as Pettigrew passed. He gave the waste of space an uninvested and meaningless but civil smile, and ambled off aimlessly towards the bookstore. As they passed each other, he let the jinx fall to a minimum again. There had to be a more efficient way to do whatever he was doing than this.

Later on in the week he'd have to get Mulciber into place to be the comparatively-friendly face once Reg had set up the mood, and then Avery. That was going to be a bother, because Avery didn't deal well with not understanding why he had to be nice to someone who wasn't worth loathing, and also couldn't do it very well without being Imperiused. In his case, a targeted confundus just did not do the trick. Mulciber, for his part, had problems with his face looking creepy when he was trying for pleasant. And they both thought it still mattered that they'd graduated first.

It was dull and frustrating and confusing and repellant, and tonight he'd be wishing with his whole soul that he was still at it. He was due for a _practice_ with Bella and her husband and Bast. That meant... _dealing with_ people he didn't care two knuts about one way or the other, because their Lord would not be maneuvering from a position of strength if his army-in-reserve was unprepared for war.

At least they'd only be muggles. The unsavory sort of muggles no one would miss, at that. And he might even be able to get away with seeing to them quickly, depending on what kind of a mood Bella and Rus were in, on whether they wanted tonight to be about efficacy or, or… anything else, really.

And he was absolutely sure that Spike wouldn't have to do any such thing, probably not ever. Bella sneered _all the time_ now about how sheltered Snape was, with his clean, prissy, workman's hands. Something of a contradiction there, Reg hadn't been able to stop himself thinking, although he knew what she meant.

But she'd go on about how while it was right and just that a halfbreed mill-shrew should not be allowed a chance to spoil the meat of The Work, there was something wrong and suspicious in someone as knife-savvy and vicious as him not begging for opportunities.

So, yes, he could quite understand why Siri would have been a bit fraught over Spike even without the two of them eternally spitting sparks like brother wands trying to duel each other.

He was glad he couldn't empathize with _that_. Reg might understand Sirius a little right now, but he was very much not his manebrained brother. For instance, he could discriminate between good and bad excitement in his life. All the excitement he was getting these days was already horrible enough without picking a fight with the cobra and having the fer-de-lance casually paint a target on his face, thank you very much.


	13. Unplottable, London

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter's starting to feel these Junior Order meetings are a bit useless. And did his friends always look at him like that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Admission** : I did not look up a map of the London subway system. However, people who aren't native to my city find ours to be very confusing and it looks simple and clean to _me_ , so I'm just assuming any subway map would be confusing the first time someone looks at one.

Sirius had blue gunk in his hair. This was about par for the course these days, but Pete would have expected him to wash it out before settling down with—what was that? "What is that?" he asked, squinting at it.

Sirius yelped like Padfoot and the enormous folded-up not-a-scroll went flying, along with all Sirius's long limbs and a carpet slipper. Pete caught the former with an accio, but perusal wasn't much help. There were words which didn't seem to add up to anything, and a very complicated diagram which was essentially a mare's nest.

"Circe and Merlin heels-up in a hayloft!" Sirius sputtered, trying to get himself right-side up. "Heard of knocking, you berk?"

"I've even employed the practice," Pete parried absently, still squinting at the thing. He hadn't _this_ time, but Sirius had been far too absorbed to have noticed. "You were busy with the… really, Paddy, what _is_ it? Some kind of map?"

Sirius nodded, retrieving his slipper. "What the muggles use instead of the Knight Bus," he said. "The Underground, Dumbledore says they call it. It being underground. Dead original, that."

"Awfully." Maybe if he turned it another-side up.

"Let that lot in for me, will you?" Sirius asked, getting up altogether with a long and somewhat involved stretch. "I want to wash this out before Moony or McKinnon gets here."

"Reckon I'd better," Pete agreed, giving Sirius's hair a pitying look just for fun.

"It can't be that bad!" he sputtered, pelting away. There followed a horrified, mournful, gleeping sort of noise from the vicinity of what was, doubtless, the nearest mirror.

Left to himself, Peter didn't fight the wan, bitter little smile that drifted its way to his lips. It would do Sirius good to feel less than perfect for five minutes together. If only he was likely to manage it for longer than five seconds.

It had been the sort of pure luck that Sirius got far too much of that his first arrival had been someone who'd only laugh at him a little; Peter hadn't even been early. It wasn't long before all his couches and large portions of the floor were occupied with, mostly, truly horrible and most unmilitary posture. Lily and Alice's bumps were making them sit nearly properly, at least, other than leaning back.

In fact, five minutes after he'd walked in, the only person absent was Sirius, evidently still fussing with his hair. It wasn't long before Marlene lost patience and sent Remus to go haul him out.

He came unwillingly, protesting and flailing, his hair all turned to blue feathers on one side of his head.

"Well done, mate," Fabian said, admiring, while Gideon stuffed nearly an entire pillow into his mouth to keep from howling loud enough to get kicked by whichever of the women were crankiest today. "What were you trying to do?"

"Winged shoes," Sirius said sulkily. "We've about got the footpad ones sorted, I mean, they're quiet as you like and barely leave any footprint even in mud now, and—"

"You got distracted," Lily finished for him, rolling her eyes. "Honestly, Sirius, they were _your_ idea."

"Well, it's all fiddly bits, now, innit?" Sirius said waving a careless, impatient hand. He'd splayed himself out on the carpet, legs wide enough to straddle the Express, and Pete noticed Gideon and Marlene both debating the virtues of ogling. "Life can't be all fiddly bits, Iris!"

Pete shared an eye-roll with James. It wasn't really clear to anyone whether Sirius was still uncomfortable being on a first-name basis with his friend's bride after seven-and-a-bit years of cold war, or was taking an easy way to annoy her due to being a git who did that with his friends.

"Leaps and bounds," Sirius trilled on, "that's progress! And then fiddly bits after tea when you're a bit dozy anyway."

She said, "Remus, I'd smack him for being wrongheaded, but I can't reach. Suppress the boy, will you?"

"Right-oh," Remus said agreeably, and picked himself up to go sit on Sirius's stomach.

"Heavy!" Sirius protested. So, with a put-upon sigh, Remus ended up lying crosswise over him, propped up by his elbows.

"New business or progress reports?" asked Marlene impatiently.

"No, wait, sorry, drinks," Sirius said, and shot a spell at his kitchenette. The cold-box opened and a tray with pitchers of lemonade and pumpkin juice floated out. The pitchers were joined, before they got to the living room, by a stack of mugs and the pots of tea and butterbeer he'd evidently had warming.

" _Now_ new business," Padfoot said when everyone had finished pouring. The pots and pitchers, naturally, were just as full as when they'd begun. "Pete, where's that—oh, thanks." Waving the map, he said, "Dumbledore flooed by in a rush and told me to get Hogwarts-familiar with this Gordian knot here, but he didn't say why. Anyone got any idea?"

"Reckon I could take a guess," said Frank, whose brown-socked feet had landed on Fabian's shoulder again. He was, himself, rubbing his wife's. Pete wasn't sure the kind of noises she was making were really on at even a partial Order meeting, although fortunately the sort of shape she was in was off-putting.

"Guess away, me old teacup," James said magnanimously, nearly decorating the floor-sitters with a splash of butterbeer as he waved his hand in gracious invitation.

"Jamie, what does that even mean?" Lily asked, somehow fond and acerbic at once.

"That he's been reading hundred-year-old adverts for packaging inspiration," Moony told her, only just on the affectionate-despair side of grim and headachy. "Go on, then, Frank."

Grinning (Pete didn't think it had been funny), Frank said, "Reckon he's worried about, well, I mean, look what happened in the Grindelwald wars."

General blankness, although Lily and Remus were nodding slowly as though he was at least making partial sense.

"Sweetheart," Alice said, managing to rub his wrist with her toes, "you were almost uniquely swotty in Binns' class, you know."

"Well, the _books_ were interesting," Frank said lamely. "I just did the reading while he droned."

"Yes, all right," Moony said, "But what _about_ the Grindelwald wars?"

"The bombings," Frank said, as though it were obvious. "All the muggles holing up in shelters. Sitting ducks. Reckon Dumbledore wants to make sure the places people could conceivably hide in are actually safe."

"And," Pete put in, an idea occurring as, changing his nauseatingly thick and warm butterbeer for lemonade, he tried very hard to think about something _other than ducks_ , "if we secure it first, it'd be a great way for _us_ to travel. As a fallback, I mean. When we don't know a place to apparate to it. They're all the nose-in-the-air sort of purebloods, right? They'd never think of it."

There was an excited hum. Pete noticed that his best friends were all looking at him. Remus had the corner of his lip quirked in that unsettling way he had where you couldn't quite tell what he was thinking, and the other two were giving him the sort of fond expressions they always gave him. He was having more trouble, lately, ignoring the feeling that these were just a bit patronizing.

"Trust you to think of using underground passages, Wormtail," James said.

Peter colored, and looked down at his hairless hands with their short and increasingly bitten nails. He wasn't sure even himself whether he was flushing with pride or resentment. "Sounds like Dumbledore's already thought of it," he muttered. "Reverse-arithmancy."

"Modesty," Sirius countered, shaking his head as sadly as if he meant dragonpox. Without lifting his head, Peter scowled.

The meeting burbled on, charms and fancies and protections and plans and map-plottings, and nothing, nothing, nothing that would have saved him. _Order of the Phoenix_ , he thought, _Junior Division, Committee For Keeping Their Own Creative Overenthusiasm Out Of Our Beards._


	14. #18 Dye Urn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Regulus is increasingly _very unhappy_ about what being a Death Eater is turning out to mean. This (and Bellatrix) being even more of a problem than tea made by Evan (which is saying something), he feels strongly that flying reindeer are an inappropriate subject for discussion at this time. _Severus_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Notes** : not _plot_ per se, but setup for plot. As will be the case for most of the domestic scenes.

"Ow!"

"Well, I'm sorry, Severus," Reg said testily, "but sometimes, you know, you just don't take a hint."

"What hint?" he asked blankly, rubbing at the fading tingle of the stinging charm between his eyes.

"Make the man some tea, Spike," Evan supplied helpfully from behind his catalogue.

"You make it," Severus said disagreeably. "I'm working."

"You're staring into space," Regulus corrected him.

And got, not unexpectedly, a narrow-eyed, irritated look. "Thinking about work is working. When did you even come in?"

Regulus hadn't just knocked, he'd rung the bell. Twice, presumably because Evan had expected Severus to answer it.

There wasn't anything odd, though, about a Severus who'd been staring into space not hearing it or noticing Evan letting him in. Jumpy though he could be, Spike having a brainstorm in a safe place was legendary. Once Mulciber and Wilkes had come in when he was mulling over a book in the common room, and they'd built nearly a full card-castle on his back before he noticed. Of course, he'd sent them off to the Pomfrey with thirty fingers each and heads that rang like bells whenever they moved as soon as he'd noticed, but by then they'd only had the left battlements left.

Therefore, Reg ignored the question. "Besides, Evan's tea's solid enough to stop the Knight Bus and thick enough to pay for the chocolate."

"Well," Severus said reasonably, "you stung me. Go on, Ev, poison him."

"Oh, I wouldn't bother making tea just for one, emerald of my sugar bowl." Ev threatened amiably, still without looking up.

 _"Gah._ " But he got up and went to the kitchen, Regulus trailing behind. He turned around at the last minute and called back, "And I was not!"

"Whatever you say, Spike," Evan called back placidly.

"Was not what?" Reg asked.

Severus gave him gimlet eyes, but he just kept looking curiously back (it was the only possible response) until Severus sighed and hunched his shoulders a little and griped, "Inappropriate."

"Oh. Yes, you were. What were you quote unquote working on, anyway?" Reg asked, tacking it on quickly, before Spike could turn it into an argument.

Severus turned and looked at him critically. "What are _you_ working on?" he demanded. "Your hair looks worse than mine."

Regulus went pale. Crying, "It does not!" he ran to the bathroom to check it. "It does _not!_ " he repeated with fully justified indignation, coming back. Then, suspiciously, "What are you grinning about?"

"Thank you for your participation in our study," Severus saleswizarded at him brightly, which was unutterably disturbing. "You will be compensated with one, brackets-on one brackets-off, extra biscuit."

"You're detestable," Reg sulked, dropping into the kitchen chair while his host puttered. "What study?"

Severus used less wand-work in his kitchen than most, so he was able to turn while filling the kettle. "You really believed me for a minute just then, didn't you?" he asked, his sharp face keen again, eyes digging in like they might peel back Reg's whole skull to get at his brain. _Phew_. Reg relaxed. "Even though I know for a fact you routinely schedule yourself a full half-hour every morning to make sure your hair is as imperturbable as it can get without being petrified and failing to flutter charmingly in the breeze."

That last was on the snide side, but Reg would have been flustered anyway. "I—well, I did believe you, as a matter of fact!"

"Caught you on an insecure point?"

"No, er…" Regulus looked uncomfortable, and said, "Look, I'm sorry, Naj, but _anyone_ would get insecure if you told them that."

"If I, specifically, told them, or if they were told?"

Regulus thought about it, relieved that Severus seemed to be in an academic rather than a prickly mood. Using Spike's serpent tag to acknowledge you knew he could bite you hard wasn't in the least mollifying when he wasn't in a mood to be mollified. "It's worse when it's you saying it."

"Why?"

"Well, you usually go edgy when you lie, for one thing."

"Didn't I this time?" Reg shook his head, and Severus made a considering noise, cupping the kettle in his hands. It was, by now, starting to sweat. "All right, that's one thing, what else?"

"Does there have to be more?"

" _Is_ there?"

"I suppose… why would you insult both of us at the same time?"

"Not sure I did, Felis," Severus drawled. "'As bad as' has no meaning on its own. But I see _you_ thought so."

"I thought you were talking yourself down and me with you," Regulus snapped, embarrassed. Spike didn't often riff off his cat-snake name (being no more likely to use it for anything but humiliating Regulus than anyone else was), but Reg deserved it for scampering off to the mirror as if he were Sirius.

Severus's skepticism was punctuated by a shriek from the tea-kettle. He put it down at once, shook out his hands, and did some things with tins and wooden boxes that Reg couldn't see through his skinny back. "And why did that make it credible?" he asked over his shoulder. Clearly he didn't believe Regulus thought he'd been talking himself down, but that just as clearly wasn't important to him at the moment.

"Well… if you were just snapping at me, why take it out on yourself, too?" Reg reasoned, picking his reaction apart slowly.

"I might have been snapping at myself and taking it out on you," he pointed out.

"No, then you wouldn't admit it was about you at all," Reg said, positive.

"Got you there, Spike!" Evan called from the other room.

"Yes, all right," Severus called back in an unruffled voice, raised to include his flatmate. "But is that everyone or just me?"

"Whyyyyyyy?" Evan called back, dripping suspicion.

"Don't make me why-ne back at you; I can hold my breath longer."

"He can, too," Evan told Regulus happily.

" _I didn't want to know that!"_ Reggie wailed. And Evan was so _weird_ , too. If you were going to overshare you were at least supposed to be _smug_ about it, not just happy like you expected everyone to be happy along with you. It was practically a _rule_. It was completely unfair the way Evan sailed over all the rules all the time and everyone just smiled back at him and flirted and sighed wistfully behind his back about what a saint he must be to put up with Snape and what nudge-wink qualities Spike must secretly have to have landed a catch like him.

"Apologize to the man, Spike," Reg's evil prat of a cousin suggested, still from the living room, full of sympathy and reproach.

"It was perfectly innocent when I said it," Severus noted dryly. "As is generally the case." He handed the tea tray to Regulus, sans kettle, and they went back in. "Well? Is it everyone, or me-specific?"

"Most people most of the time, I should think," Evan said cautiously. "Defensive and self-depreciating are mutually exclusive, as a rule of thumb. But it falls under inked, especially if the person _knows_ they're feeling defensive and doesn't want to let on." He saw Reg's confusion and elaborated, "You Never Can Tell. YNCT: inked."

"Move," Severus told him, holding the kettle only slightly menacingly.

"What."

"Move."

They eyed each other for a moment. Regulus took that to time observe that Severus, the rat, had arranged the biscuits into an ungraceful but distinct pattern. It would be obvious if he snuck one before the tea was poured, and then everyone would _smirk_ at him.

Evan sighed with a little smile, and moved from the armchair to the sofa. He was followed threateningly with a loaded kettle until he'd crammed himself up against the arm of it.

Severus put the kettle on the tray, and lay down. He had his head in Evan's lap and his unshod legs folded up against the sofa's other arm. "Evan doesn't think my hair is disgusting," he said in a put-upon voice, eyes closed.

It still took Reg aback when he did things like that. A bunch of kids crowded on the floor around Spike's legs (and very respectfully not talking to him at all except to ask the occasional question) had been a common Common Room sight in his last few years at school. And it was true that he'd spent quite large portions of his last few train rides to school napping on Evan and Narcissa, who'd never seemed surprised about it. So clearly his standoffishness had been a public-spaces thing, a public-face thing, and Reg really was pleased that he didn't seem to trigger it on his own.

Still, different years visited each others' bedrooms far less often than girls visited the boys in their year, as a rule, and if he'd acted differently in his dormitory than in the Common Room, Reg hadn't seen him do it. He still wasn't used to this more relaxed Spike, who didn't shuffle around with knife-slitted eyes and his shoulders by his ears, or watch his tongue, and didn't hesitate before smacking the Rosier heir upside the head or curling up in his lap.

"Evan knows it isn't," Evan confirmed, lacing a gentle hand into the aforementioned hair. Which, honestly, Regulus would not have liked to try, although it moved like it was clean despite the unhealthy oily sheen, no clumping or clinging. "Unlike your current exhibition of table manners."

"I'm not sitting at the table, or eating. Table manners do not currently apply." After a moment, "What would you imagine I'd rather be doing right at this moment?"

"I'm still here!" Regulus said hastily.

Spike opened one eye and grinned evilly at him, snaking a hand behind Evan's back. "Nothing that can't be done from here, then? Nice image, Reg?"

"Lovely image," Evan agreed, perking up hopefully.

"Oh, _tea!"_ Reg exclaimed desperately. "Who'd like some nice _tea?"_

"And nobody thinks I want to stay at a party I leave early," Severus said speculatively, turning his head back into Evan's slow-stroking hand and letting his eyes fall shut again, "but they wouldn't assume they knew whether anyone who's still there wants to be there, would they? Barring unpleasantness and poorly-controlled expressions."

"You have a theory," Evan decided, in the tone that meant he was getting an idea what it was. So was Regulus, for that matter.

"Someone does," Spike said, putting a bit of an emphasis on that 'someone.' "Use what you've got, and all that." He turned back to Regulus, peeling his eye open again, and asked, "What _are_ you working on, anyway? You haven't got bags under your eyes yet, puss, but you are getting a rather strained look."

"Look who's talking," Evan said fondly, and bent down—presumably intending just to kiss his forehead, but Severus arched up enough to meet him partway.

"He is, though, look," maintained Severus, settling back down.

"You are, too, Reggie," Evan agreed, looking at Regulus critically.

Reg scowled. It was just like being back at school again, sharp black eyes on you and then suddenly Evan or Narcissa blithely sailing up to be concerned and inquisitive and prefectly. Presumably Regulus was supposed to take it as a nod to his age that Spike was siccing them on him to his face now.

"Drawn," Severus said sadly, his thin lips pulled wickedly up.

"Pale," Evan put in, shaking his head.

"—er than usual," Spike, who had no room to talk, evidently couldn't resist. He added in horrible delight, "You'll be getting _lines between your eyes_."

"I hate you both."

"But you know we must love _you,_ because we tell you the truth," Severus crooned, all darkest treacle and evil with evil sauce and black-honeyed evil on the side.

"And I know it's the truth because it's rude?" Regulus mocked his 'theory.'

"So I hear."

"But really, Reggie, what's wrong?" Evan asked, his overdose of concern thoroughly distracting a startled Reg from how evasive Spike had just been.

"Oh, don't give me your doe eyes," he snapped defensively, coiling himself around his teacup. "You think I don't know where half our intel comes from?"

"At least a tenth, anyway, I suspect, now Narcissa's not so mobile," Severus said meticulously, turning to bump Evan's side with (Regulus thought uncharitably) his beak. "What sort of doe has blue eyes? Not albino, that'd be pink. Wouldn't it?"

"Such flattery," Evan said modestly, fluttering his long, not at all dark lashes. "Sometimes, though, I think. What are you asking me for? You're the one who took Creature Care."

"Care of _Magical_ Creatures, Ev; we didn't do _deer_. And you had that commission for that ranch in Norway last year, you remember, the one with all the elves—"

"Those were reindeer. _Flying_ reindeer. Definitely magical creatures."

"Anyway, they were albino…"

"Just white, heart. Winter coats and all."

"Oh. Well, can't blame them. It was bloody freezing up there; I can't remember the last time my on-automatic magic wasn't enough to keep me warm."

Reg knew what that meant, more or less. Severus was always the person to stand near in bad weather and infamously never used cauldron thermometers, just like Becca Goldstein had never been known to get lost no matter _what_ the Hogwarts stairs did to her. Evan, though he couldn't see in the dark, had as good a feel for lighting charms as old Flitwick had had for acoustics. Still did, presumably.

"We were there for a _week,_ " Evan pointed out, bemused.

"And a most productive week it was," Severus allowed in a _your data, while correct, is not relevant_ voice. "Fascinating lichens. Also: freezing."

"Well, Hat-stand, if you'd _eat something_ once in a while…"

"Nonsense."

The interesting thing was," Evan told Reggie, suddenly enthused (which looked rather odd on him), "their bellies were blue. Which is only sense, of course, but you somehow expect black, even knowing reindeer aren't noct—"

Regulus, who had had his eyes clamped closed and been breathing with forced regularity for the last several minutes, raised his voice. A lot. " _You think I don't know where half our intel comes from_ , tricking everyone's families into _chatting_ with you while they pose…"

"It's not a trick, Reggie," said Evan mildly, tilting his head at Reg curiously. "It's 'not being wasteful of what I hear in chats I'd have anyway.' If it worked when you weren't really inclined to like them, anyone could do it. _Spike_ could."

"Too kind."

Evan ignored him, beyond a brief grin down. "Besides, you don't do as good a portrait if you don't get to know them."

"And you know Evan's asking because he's worried," Severus put in sharply, turning over to rise onto an elbow, "so why digress into how he mines his targets?"

That was nasty. With _do you think you're a proper target for the tricking_ hanging in the air between them all, Evan cuffed Severus lightly around the top of his head and murmured, "Hood down, Prince Charming." Then he turned to Reg and said, "And you, claws in, if you please. Honestly, Reggie, what's the matter with you today?"

They were both giving him piercing, frowning eyes now, and that was so much harder to fight than Evan's untrustworthy innocent-concern look.

And he must have wanted them to nose in. Because had he really thought he could drop in here, on these two, and avoid it? Narcissa, maybe, especially with her sister involved. Narcissa didn't just _use_ good manners, she _had_ them. But Evan would saunter casually after you forever like he had nothing else to do, whistling, and a Ravenclaw hunting down a citation in NEWT year had _nothing_ on Spike when he thought something was wrong.

And Reg knew it. You had to be honest with yourself, at least. He collapsed a little, and muttered, "Bella thinks I'm too soft."

Evans' hissed breath was swallowed by Spike's gulped, "Oh, hell."

Before Regulus had time to blink again, he was on the couch with them. Evan held him down to let Spike, straddling him with eyes hard and cold and remote in diagnosis, run his wand up and down. It wasn't an Ollivander wand, Regulus noticed. This wasn't new information, but it was something to notice instead of how humiliated and small and taken-care-of and shrivelingly grateful he felt. He'd probably never been smaller than Spike physically, but some people took up more space than their bodies did. Reg wasn't one of them.

"He'll do," Severus told Evan over his head eventually, sitting down on Reg's legs. "Not hurt, no untreated curses or important curse residue. Something odd when I check for mind-magic effects, but it doesn't look like a confusion, a compulsion, or an attack. More of a muddle, really."

"She's teaching me to shield my mind," Regulus supplied.

"Not well, then," Severus said coolly. "No surprise. Wouldn't want you able to keep her out, would she. If that's even a real thing; could just as easily be an excuse to peek regularly."

"You shut up about Bella!"

"Does she ever shut up about me?" Spike asked. Under his calm, curious eyes, Reg held out barely a few seconds before sagging. "I trust you don't flare out like that at _her_."

Reg shivered. "Salazar, no."

"Good. Do it over me and I'll see your tombstone has fat cartoon mice on it and squeaks alarmingly whenever anyone drops flowers." Reg tried half-heartedly to knee him, and got his hair mussed for his trouble. Evan let go of his arms, and Severus swung off him.

When he didn't get up, they curled in around him, warm and unshakable. Sharp marble on one side, solid muscle on the other. Hawkishly, vigilantly still. Safe-making, as Reggie's real brother, impetuous and restless, battering himself raw against his cage, too choked and frantic to have spare attention for anyone else, had never been.

After a while, he said, quietly, "Stakes were lower at school."

"They weren't," Spike said grimly. "You just didn't see them."

He knew they were having an eye-conversation over his head. Because Severus had been absolutely right, he knew that everyone was better off if he refrained from finding out about it. Bella had said she'd be reading his thoughts, but the _books_ had said she'd only see his memories. And not from the outside, like in a Pensieve, either. What he didn't see or hear was safe. Probably. Safer.

"All right," Severus said eventually. "Bellatrix thinks you're soft and it's a problem. Then, how does the problem manifest, and what's to be done? And you can shut it, Ev; when your problem involves Bellatrix, you don't have time for dancing about."

"Right you are, Precision Corkscrew," Evan said in an eye-rolling voice.

"Call me a blunt instrument all you like," Severus scowled, "but she's a bola made out of two morning-stars. On fire. Greek fire. Big ones. As in, boulder-sized. Launched off a catapult."

"That's her chest."

"Evan. Image. Evan. Thorn. _In_ my side. No. Image. _Why._ "

"Had to be said," Evan fluted like an oboe, seraphically pleased with himself. "Walked right into it with the two boulders, you did. She is awfully well built, Spike, admit it."

"A Damascus blade is awfully well built," retorted Severus, "and I have no academic or aesthetic interest in this fact when it is _lunging sharply for my head_."

"Also, if anyone talks about Bella's breasts again I'm going to have to get violent," Regulus put in helpfully, cuddled warmly between them. The point of this was to not need this conversation obliviated before his next occlumency lesson. He should probably have tried harder to sound menacing. Er. He could tell her he'd been being politic? Because it was Evan. Who didn't need overkill. That might work.

"Whereas I'm merely going to have to get nauseous."

"You mean nauseated."

"So I do. Pity; it doesn't sound so well. Not so pithy. But what does Reg mean?" Severus turned back to him. "What does she think you're too soft for? Or, about."

"Well, er, you know…" he trailed off. It occurred to him that he didn't know what they knew. More, he couldn't assume that they, moving most often plausibly and in the light as they did, were _supposed_ to know anything about what went on under the moon. "Generally squeamish."

There was another long silence, but it felt leaden. Spike swore coarsely again, dispirited. His bony shoulder sort of drooped sturdily between Reg and the door, like a bird's wing become a shield. Reg didn't know how he did that, but he did know now that they had understood him, more or less perfectly.

"Reggie," Evan asked after a while, his arm close around Reg's back, "do _you_ think you're 'too soft'? I mean, are you having trouble… doing what you're being asked to?"

Reg nodded silently, and then there was third long pause. Like the first, it was heavy with a conversation Reg was glad not to be in on.

"Isn't anyone going to have any biscuits?" Severus asked, twanging with fabricated annoyance. "If not, I'm putting them away."

Reg tipped most of them into a handkerchief before saying, "All clear."

Spike stared at the near-absence of biscuit. "Clear indeed," he said dryly, and vanished into the kitchen with the plate, shaking his head.

He'd been promised an extra, so that was three for him, and two to bring Father, who approved of Severus's 'attempts to rehabilitate his bloodline' and also found him tolerably amusing. Two more for Aunt Lucy, who had been in some club with Severus's mum at school and had rather liked her, and two for Grandfather. Moving out of Grimmauld and in with Aunt Lucy had been good for his blood pressure, but he got lonely. Reggie would take any excuse to visit him. _Look, Granddad, mystery biscuits_ , leading to one more attempt to convince him that Severus was worth knowing despite being descended from both a Muggle and Severus Prince, who Grandfather had detested no matter how good the family's blood was, would do nicely.

Oh, and one more biscuit: to tease the elf with.

Severus wasn't as reliably good a cook as Kreacher or the elves at school, of course. Still, his odd experiments were more likely to be interesting than passable, and, when interesting, slightly more likely to be spectacular than inedible. Reg had been keeping track. There was a chart. It cheered Kreacher up some days, and other days it made him try _really hard._ For Regulus, this was a win-win.

When he'd finished watching Severus walk off (not even _trying_ to be subtle about it, for Salazar's sake), Evan looked down at Reg seriously, and said, "All right, kit-cat."

Sometimes Reg wished they'd use his snake's proper Latin name. Only sometimes: with an even slightly improper intonation, Fallax was very nearly as bad as Pussy-pusskins: the all-time low and therefore, predictably, a Gildylocks effort.

"You and me, between the threads."

" _Are_ you on the tapestry?" Reg asked, trying to remember. When a witch married out, it didn't keep track of the line past her children. Would Bella respect that oath, if she saw it in his head, if it was with a Rosier?

"Yes, I ruddy well am," Evan said evenly, which was the Evan-equivalent of Spike hurling a paperweight at your head. "To Darius Rosier and Callisto Black, one-S. Book up, Reggie; I think _Spike_ knows the lineages better'n you by now.  Come on, 'first cousins' is not hard to remember."

"I _know_ who your mum is! It's just—oh, never mind. Between the threads, then," Reg said hastily, seeing no reason to have his heirsmanship examined.

He knew the _lineages,_ he just didn't like looking at the tapestry. By the time knowing it cold had become his job, his brother had been swallowed by a scorched hole, and so had cousin Andi, who'd used to take him frog-hunting and taught him to skip stones with and without magic. And old Uncle Alf, not long after that, who'd always smelled like sandalwood and tobacco and always had a big hug and a sweet for Siri and Reg and who was dead anyway.

Dad hated it, too. Dad hated a lot of things. Dad and Reggie and Granddad were the same like that, but there was just no telling Mother anything. Siri had tried and tried and tried until he went horrible and cruel and mad with it. Now he was dead to them, just a burn-mark, and they were all scum to him.

He tried quirking a little smile. Hoping to distract himself if not Evan, he asked, "And sub rosa?"

"That too," his Rosier cousin agreed, with a secretive, faraway smile that meant he was thinking about something involving that phrase, probably Spike (but potentially almost anyone they knew, given what he'd been like the year or two before his OWLs), and definitely Things Regulus Would Rather Not Think About. Going serious again, he asked, "What kind of bad is it? For you."

Regulus thought about last night, and started to feel sick again very quickly.

Apparently his expression was answer enough. "Are you going to be able to keep on?" Evan asked grimly. "Or, rather, keep up?"

"I don't know," he whispered. "It's horr—hard, Evan, it's really hard."

He could feel Evan swallow. "I can't get you out of it," his cousin said starkly. "Even if you ask me, I… that hasn't worked. Backfired. I wish I could, Reggie, believe me. I would, if I could see a way."

"I'm not asking," Reg said hastily, something withering in him that he hadn't let himself know was there.

"In fact, I don't know that I can help you at all," Evan said. "But I expect Severus can."

"Severus!" Reg echoed, dubious. "Evan, if he were so much as to say one word, to anyone, and it got back to her, or to Him—"

"Oh, he can't get you out of it, either," the fer-de-lance agreed, coolly cordial. "Should I catch him trying, you're finished."

Although Reg wouldn't have dreamed of pointing Spike at anything so dangerous and useless even without the threat, he flinched.

Evan went on, his ally, too, again, again human and warm and comforting. Almost as terrifying as Bella, when you knew it. But, up to a line Reg had _no intention_ of crossing, on his side.

"But if anyone in this world knows about carrying on through nightmares, it's Spike. I doubt he knows how he does it, and I don't say he's gotten through without… well, without turning into Spike."

Reg made a noise that was half agreement and half urrrgh.

"But if you're not Slytherin enough to learn more than a teacher who loves you can find the words for, Rabbit," Evan went on, hugging him around the shoulders with a smile, "I don't know that there _is_ any hope for you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The original terrible _sub rosa_ joke was in _The Wicket Gate: June 11._


	15. Undisclosed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lord Voldemort would like to know how Severus intends to keep Bellatrix from destroying him, because the Dark Lord has a new assignment for his shiny new obsidian shiv...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **style warning/note thingy** : just to reiterate? Tom is an insert-expletive possessive creeper. He thinks he sounds suave and magnificent, and patronizing in the I Am Your Patron way. Please do not imagine the author shares this impression. 
> 
> Also? Severus has dealt with the dude before. And noticed. So, yeah, there will be some style-matching from the serpent who'd bewitch the mind, ensnare the senses, and put a stopper in death.
> 
> That's 'style-matching' as used by salesmen and hypnotherapists, you understand, not, like, models or BFFs. Handbags and shoes do not come into it... although anyone who wants to write that parody, I'd read it. ;)

"Tell me, Severus," said Lord Voldemort, toying with his wineglass in idle curiosity, "how you intend to keep my dear Bellatrix from destroying you."

Severus blinked, and frowned from behind his thumb. "Bellatrix thinks I'm important enough to destroy, my Lord?"

"She certainly will if she thinks you're stealing her protégé," Voldemort said dryly.

"Ah." Severus nodded, saying, "I was going to ask you about that once you were satisfied with today's progress, sir. Although 'stealing' Regulus is certainly not my intention."

"Ask me now," the Dark Lord invited. He smiled a little: he could, in the slight lean towards him, the miniscule head-tilt and millimeter's upslide of one eyebrow, nearly smell Severus mentally jumping up and down in paroxysms of bright-eyed, admiring curiosity about how he'd found out. It was a great improvement that there was barely a trace of it on his face.

"I'm not alone in worrying about failing you, my Lord," Severus said seriously. "Regulus…" he paused, seeming to search for words. "Regulus tended to deal with difficulties, as a child, by retreating. He was born with a sensitive temperament, and his family can be," another pause, this time certainly searching for tact. He settled on, "Loud. As a natural Slytherin, he naturally took the path of least resistance."

Voldemort nodded, and gestured gracefully for his man to go on.

"Don't mistake me, my Lord, he hasn't _complained,_ but those who know him can see that his evenings with the Lestranges are exhaustingly overstimulating for him," Severus shrugged, opening his hands. "I haven't asked what they've been doing, of course, but he seems to find them intense and primal, and not in a way that comes naturally to him. It wears on his nerves. He's getting tired, worn thin, jittery. Bellatrix and Rodolphus seem to have limitless supplies of energy. He feels the contrast deeply, and that only makes things worse. He's not someone who shame concentrates; it just frays him, makes him use up more energy fretting."

"And what do you propose to do about it, that she can't?" Severus gave no flicker of reaction to the silky warning in his voice, but Voldemort had no misapprehension that it had gone over his head. He was quite pleased.

"My lord," Severus said wryly, "can a leaping flame show a salmon how to live emblazoned? When something comes so easily that one has never had to learn it, how can one teach it to someone who finds it alien and baffling? Bellatrix is fueled by her work. She doesn't work at it, it's air to her. Regulus is quiet, and made for quiet things. He wants to learn what will help him keep up with her, if that's what you would have of him, from someone else who's had to learn not to be burned out."

"Is that you, Severus?" He asked this with a distinct droll note. It was a great deal easier to imagine Severus on metaphorical fire than it was the languid and rather plodding young Black heir. Severus kept that part of himself far more tightly contained than Bella did: only one of them was in a position to do as she liked, and they both knew which it was. But Lord Voldemort had seen him flare.

Severus didn't look much like his mother when he smiled, even when he smiled like the dust of bitter herbs. The face shape was there, and some of the features, but Voldemort remembered the gangling young Gryffindor as a sullen, truculent-looking girl, no real spark to her.

He hadn't been opposed to cultivating students of other Houses and years than his own, and still made a point of observing the children on their Hogsmeade weekends, looking for potential. He'd learned about some of his best that way, the ones with no connections to those who were already his. Rookwood, for example, and Travers, and Crouch.

Ellie Prince had been a good student, he'd been told, and there had been a glint of cleverness in her dark eyes. She'd struck him, though, as the sort of person who would have been in Hufflepuff if the Sorting Hat didn't take family histories into account. The sort of person who had no handles, who could be hurt but not turned, who would dig in up to the chin and never budge, and who had no flicker of interest in politics. A person, in fact, of no use whatever, worth no effort and best left alone.

How that sour lump and some clod of a muggle had created his skittish, quick-eyed, scorpion-tailed, bull's-eye-colored alley cat was beyond him. The boy must be a sport, a Plantagenet or Boleyn throwback as he was himself a Slytherin one.

"I suspect surviving the hunt isn't quite the same lesson as becoming it," the throwback was saying, dry. "But I'm happy to tell him what I know about… about keeping focused in a whirlwind, my Lord, if he thinks it'll help."

Voldemort nodded, losing interest in the subject, and said dismissively, "If you have time."

His man straightened at once, eyes fixing on him.

"Tell me, my own," the Dark Lord said, his pet slithering into his lap. "In your years at school, how many of your Dark Arts professors were still in residence at the end of the year?"

"Two, my Lord."

"So many!" he was unpleasantly surprised. "And did they return in the autumn?"

"No, sir. They both told us at the outset that they had one-year contracts that prohibited renewal."

"Clever," he murmured. "Well, Severus, the end of the academic year approaches."

"…Yes, my Lord."

Voldemort regarded the completely blank, wall-eyed expression with private amusement and outward severity. "If you mean to teach the Black boy how to ward off panic attacks in the night, my own, you had better work harder at not having them yourself."

"Yes, my Lord, but Regulus doesn't have the same kind I do. He thinks _Divination_ is how one predicts the future."

Voldemort laughed at his dour, depressed tone, tightened throat, and shallowed breathing. "Finish your wine, my soldier, and retrieve yourself. And then we will, let us say, go over your NEWT."

" _Ohfu_ —Yes, my Lord."

He frowned. "Lapse like that again and you'll be punished, Severus."

"Yes, sir."

"The compliment is noted, but I cannot afford such crude and undisciplined reactions in you."

"I know," Severus gloomed, and that was why Voldemort would trust him farther than he could be thrown. When he treated superiors as peers, it was because he was in harmony with their thoughts, not in rebellion. When he forgot his manners, it wasn't out of resentment but from shame.

It needed beating out of him anyway.


	16. That Evening, Dye Urn Alley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reggie takes a head trip, and might have preferred acid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings** : mind magic, Severus-brain, rawness, visual metaphor. Seriously, we're talking psychic vivisection of a survivor of chronic domestic abuse and bullying, as well as at least one (canonical) incident of sexual harassment. Those experiences won't be specifically touched on, though.

"…Hello?"

"Not tonight, Reggie," Evan's voice through the door was quiet, firm, and upset.

Regulus let himself in, and the wards didn't try to keep him out. Therefore he was welcome-enough, and had no guilt whatsoever about ignoring Evan completely. "Are you all right?"

"Fine, Reggie, go away."

He followed the voice to (with some trepidation) the loo. His eyes widened. "If I show this memory to Bella," he said calmly, "it'll satisfy her. She'll back right off you, Spike."

Severus, heaving like a blown horse and shaking like nothing Regulus had ever seen, lifted his head from between his knees to bare chattering teeth in a wry _yes she would but try it and death_ rictus. He was covered in sweat, slashed with teartracks over his face, huddled against Evan's side as the two of them perched on the side of the steaming bath. His hair was dripping with it, his sleeves and waistcoat slashed to ribbons, their rags patched all over with wet shadow-colors against the slate-green and thunderhead grey. Evan's own white sleeve had gone translucent around his shoulders, bleeding purple onto them both where Ev had apparently missed a drop of paint cleaning up.

"Regulus!" Evan snapped. "I said _not tonight._ "

"N-no," Severus shuddered. "If I c-can tonight, I can _anyt-time_."

Evan looked him over calculatingly, and said, "All right, but have a soak first."

" _Now,_ " the cobra hissed. Jerking his head up, he didn't just catch but seized Reg's eyes. " _Come with me._ "

It was nothing like the Dark Lord's legilimency, or Bella's. Regulus wasn't pierced or probed, but caught up in a storm of terror. There was old, dull fear like a suit of weights that prickled and dragged and never went away, there was an hysterical babble of recent memories, all slashing wands and crashing magics, there was harsh, seething dust choking him, slicing up his throat, and there were sharp knives of snarling, vicious contempt circling, always waiting, stirred now into a vengeful hum.

**_THERE IS TIME_ ** **.**

It was a rolling bell across the world of fear. Evan's voice, but full of warmth and cool breezes, all gentleness and immoveable steel. A ghost that shook everything, shook Regulus to his bones, it left him shaking on his knees in the settled dust. Left him still and clear and empty as glass, weak-limbed and tender, teary with relief.

The knives slowed. And there they were now, slow enough that Regulus could tell they were faces. He couldn't see whose; some veil blurred them from him. But though he couldn't name them, they were no faceless mass. Some retreated, some pressed close, and he found his eye drawn to a fist, a wand, a cold expression that even blurred was more frightening than either.

_NAME YOUR ARMS._

A woman's voice, crisp and low and uncompromising, with a strong note of Yorkshire. Not so all-encompassing or world-bending or strange as the first one, but pealing out powerfully out all the same. A wall at his back, wobbling to keep its balance like a tower of jelly so that he knew a shot might get past it to any part of him at any time, but not for its lack of trying. A world of comfort, even if it wasn't much help. He didn't recognize it, as he'd recognized Evan's voice, but it shot glad, fierce steel through his spine. And it made him want to scream his throat raw, too, scream his heart and every single organ out till there was nothing left but cured leather for a shield. Get behind it, throw himself over it, catch every curse himself, _cut_ _everything_ _to bloody ribbons_ and dissolve in miserable, shameful gratitude at once (and oh, that one Reggie knew from the inside out), because the wall would never, never let him, not any of it. And he knew, steel rising again, that if he couldn't take the blows and she wouldn't let him end the shooter, he'd just have to fix the world. No other choice.

Answering that cold determination, the weights dragging him down flew apart, flew one by one to crash through him. Each impact was a doubled-image, something terrible that Regulus could almost taste but couldn't quite see and didn't want to, paired with one of Mother's screaming fits, or Bella's experiments, or Sirius's tantrums, and on, and on, and on.

Each impact was a horrible, fortifying smile, just _exactly_ like that rictus of Spike's in the outside world. _Got through that,_ each weight snarled, dark as Spike's voice with grim, unsatisfying triumph, _got through_ that, _got through THAT_. Every pulse of never-enough victory formed around him in a deflecting shield of impenetrable mirrors. Their combined weight, so crushing before, had become grounding, comforting, shifting scale mail.

Regulus's wand was in his right hand. It had gone a little strange, somehow too sharp and too thick at once, a machete and a club, but was unmistakably his wand, light and easy and familiar in his hand. Everywhere he looked there were the words of a spell, its wand motion seething beneath it, or the recipe of a potion, the shadows and scents of its ingredients, the beguiling coils of its steam. Runes and arithmantic arrays and equations were scribbled together like coal-dusty attic cobwebs stamped all over by inky sparrow feet, whispering sense when glanced at in passing, making his head hurt if he tried to make sense of them.

In his left hand was a thesaurus, bound in silvery, iridescent snakeskin, its pages humming and flipping in eagerness to serve, its green ribbon of bookmark flickering like a forked tongue. Reg nearly laughed.

_You have this._

And that was Spike's voice for nearly-real, no echoes, nothing strange about it. Just Spike's voice, brisk and prosaic and unhurried. Spike's very own slightly irritated what-are-you-fussing-about?

But pulsing below the sound of it was hot, savage, redblack _rip maim claw cleave burn you to ASH AND CINDERS fuck with ME you bastards I will SHRED you END you FREEZE YOU SOLID KICK YOU SHATTERED LEAVE YOU BLEEDING AND DEATH WILL NOT SILENCE YOUR DEFEAT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME AT THEM LET ME_ _ **OUT**_ _!_

And Regulus, six glinting, buzzing knives catching his eye at once, heard his own voice. Tranquil as clotted cream, it noted, "I'll manage."

And then it was Severus's eyes in front of him. Severus unarmored in shredded, parched-moss colored linen, limp as his hair and utterly wrung-out. Severus and Evan, himself all rumpled and only about eighty percent drier. Severus and Evan in their not-quite-elf-clean bathroom. Evan's landscapes gracing the bathroom walls with soothing, rippling leaves and lapping waves. Rows of vials labeled in the cramped, spiky eye-bane known as Severus's handwriting, arming the shelves below the paintings with silent power and promise.

"I'll have that soak now, if it's still on offer," Severus rumbled exhaustedly into Evan's neck. His deep voice was on the muffled side, but the words were perfectly distinct.

"I should think," Evan said tartly, rubbing his back with long, slow strokes. He gave Regulus a reproachful but unvengeful look. "Out, you."

Regulus pulled his feet back under him (when had he fallen?) without a word, and turned to the door. But when he got there, he turned again, hesitant. "Severus?"

He got no reply but the turn of Spike's head, the peeling open of one wet-pebble eye.

"I… I don't think I can do that." He didn't even really know what that had _been_ , besides a pants-wetting maelstrom.

"Of course you can't," Severus told him, in exactly that brisk, unsentimental voice that had so recently come from no throat at all. It was the most comforting sound in Reggie's world: if the cobra wasn't white-eyed and jumpy, absolutely nothing going on was worth worrying about. "In the first place, you may not, in fact, have time, and it's a different part of yourself you need to master and quiet. In the second, it's new to you, and I've been working out how to… how to manage since I was seven."

Regulus blanched. That was… that was awful. And very, very clearly still a work in progress. Which, how bad did that mean it been at the start? Also, would it take Reg that long? He didn't have that long!

"And finally, dimwit," Severus went on, his voice full of humor now. Evan smiled, shoulders dropping whole inches, and turned his face into his partner's sweaty temple. " _I_ can't get _your_ mind right. I don't even know whether what you saw is what I experienced. Hell," he added, crudely mugglish. For once, Reggie's flinch at it was because he'd felt it, that snarling chin-up defiance that looked so unthinking and casual, from the inside. "I don't know if 'blue' looks the same to you or salt tastes the same, just because we both reliably recognize the stimuli. We sort and see the world through our minds, our memories and understanding and feelings, not from our senses directly. How can I tell you how to root and arm yourself? Why on earth would what works for me work for you?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Credit** for 'getting your mind right' (and all future reference to headology) goes, of course, to Esme Weatherwax. And if you don't know Granny, I just can't help you. Only you can help yourself. Prob'ly with an ax or similar. ;) 
> 
> **Geeky rambling** : Severus isn't a nihilist, or even the primarily the stoic he used to think he was (and Albus is? Or just pure pragmatist? But doesn't 'the greater good' mean he's ultimately trying to minimize the world's overall suffering? Discuss!). He's a fundamentally a skeptic born under Janus. A Pyrrhonic skeptic, I think, although it's possible there's some pragmatic eclecticism and empiricism involved and the fear that if I want to be sure I'll have to _read some actual Descartes_ may be justified. Not actually my field... @.@
> 
> And, for the record, taste, at least, is not the same between people. Thousands of us coulda told the world that years, decades, centuries ago, if we hadn't had our experiences de-legitimized as 'you're such a picky eater, don't you know kids in Africa/China/Detroit/Atlantis are starving, eat your brussels sprouts and stop gagging like it's toxic waste, Calvin, don't be ridiculous, of _course_ it tastes like food.'* _Thank you, Science:_ we now know there are at least three basic levels of, as it were, pre-loaded taste sensitivity (it's probably a spectrum, most things are), and that's before you take into account getting desensitized to sugar and burning your taste buds off with hot sauce and so on. Some interesting new research about what mothers eat prenatally affecting what kids will like, but how much does preference have to do with taste-the-sense? Oh existential neurology mystique. (hearts)
> 
> *My favorite was when his mom told him it was stewed monkey brains so he'd eat it, and then his dad turned green and couldn't touch a bite. I think we know which sides of the family the hellraiser and the vivid-imagination genes came from, and even though Dad eventually started using the tactic too, because he can learn, those two traits were not from the same side. XD I realize I'm diluting my point by using Calvin, since he was more wary of food he didn't recognize than overwhelmed or repelled by overstrong flavors or food that did not taste like something that should go in one's mouth, but... Calvin. ♥


	17. Later, Still Dye Urn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just because Severus is a ranter doesn't mean he can't keep his mouth shut when he has to. Turns out he's had concerns about this pureblood promotion club thingy for a while now. No... longer than that. 
> 
> His new memory spell lets him risk being honest. Er. Well. Probably mostly honest?

"I've got a new spell," Severus announced drowsily. He was clean and dry again, curled up on Evan's chest on the couch in front of the fire. The night was warm for a fire, but sometimes you needed one anyway. Sometimes the play of light and the crackle of the wood was worth it, sometimes too warm was good. "At least, I think I have."

"Oh? Planning to share this largess?"

"Yes, I'd like to, if you wouldn't mind helping me test it."

"Test away," Evan said languidly.

Severus pulled his wand out and chanted, " _Tabula adamantium_."

"Like tabula rasa? I don't feel anything."

"Ha!" Severus exclaimed. "I _do_ have a new spell. This is the third casting in ten minutes, and you've said just the same every time."

Evan, before checking the clock, blinked into the dark hair. It smelled, unusually, of chamomile, valerian, sandalwood, and oranges.

Spike had been inches from another shaking collapse once Reggie was safely out the door. Letting someone else into his coping magic had forced him into bloody-minded perfection, but also been _awful._ It had made him more aware of everything painful when he'd been trying for anaesthetized, he'd said, and no emphasis on how awestruck and cowed Reggie had looked would dissuade him from insisting it had been mortifying.

Severus Did Not Like feeling exposed. Hadn't even before fifth year. No one had ever seen even in their own common room out of full academic sub-fusc, complete with boots and wand-holster. Not even when everyone else was in sleepwear and dressing gowns. Not even without his robes, for the first few months of the first year, the first few weeks of the next few. When he'd sat down outside on the Hogwarts grounds, he always, always had his back to a wall, a bush, a tree. On particularly bad days, he'd kept a mirror in his hand and put up with the jokes.

And while it was common enough for serious brewers to put on charms or topical potions that would protect them from splashes and fumes when they went into a stillroom, Spike used his version all day every day, put it in his soap. Minor hexes and jinxes slid off it, and he'd gotten a vicious satisfaction from the confusion this had caused in the halls.

Even though it was only translucent, and discolored him from hair to teeth. Even though the worse he looked the more casual everyone was about making a target of him. He preferred feeling armored over not actually being a walking target.

The fume-protectant was less of a problem for Evan since they'd graduated. It had stopped being about the daily grind of feeling like a fox in a dog pack, and was now largely about habit and Severus not being comfortable with eyes he didn't trust lingering on him. Which was fine with Evan, and probably intelligent, under the circumstances. He thought it was a bit sad, though, and there had a been a period when he'd wondered whether he and Narcissa were going to be absolutely compelled to get their hands all grimy ripping some grubby old muggle mill-rat limb from limb and muscle from bone.

Or possibly Filch. Or, at an outside guess, Lucius (he would have left Narcissa out of that one). Not Wilkes, though. Severus had never hesitated to slam Wilkes through the ceiling or turn those wandering hands into flippers or turn, for that matter, a hair over it. His bored and impatient (if edgy) reaction to Wilkes was, in fact, what had convinced Evan that the chisels and hammers that had hewn out his spike had at least been… sanitary.

Whatever the reason, though, Severus's cuffs were invariably skin-tight, much-buttoned affairs stretching nearly to his elbows, and he'd not only fallen in love with but stolen a pair of the stiff, knee-length Quidditch boots that everyone else complained about walking in. He ducked under his hair whenever he was embarrassed, and their bed was a curtained four-poster. Their guest bed was, too. He hadn't even glanced at one that wasn't, had walked past every single bed that didn't close off as if it didn't exist. Their windows had shutters and three layers of curtain, and he was the only person Evan knew, really the only one, who used book covers.

Good ones, too. They made everything look like that day's Prophet, and he put them on everything from his dreadful muggle fiction and poetry to the respectable and intensely boring _Potioneer's Monthly_ and _Seasonal Stirring._

(Actually, the fiction and especially the poetry had been growing on Evan, and at a frankly embarrassing pace. But that, he was sure, was only because he was getting them in Spike's voice, or reading them to a snuggly Spike-in-his-lap. Usually a Spike, in either case, who was idly petting or nuzzling him, and might at any moment start absently dropping kisses that came closer and closer together until they both forgot there was a book in bed with them. Under those circumstances, he maintained, one could become fond of the _floo directory._ )

And that was the mind Regulus had been inside. When it was already a half-inch away from breaking down in exhausted, overstimulated, intimidated tears. And the Gryffie thugs had given 'Snivellus' a _serious complex_ about tears.

And to gild the lily—no. _For gravy_ , Severus had gotten a head full of Reggie's hurts. Taken objectively, taken as described, few of these had been particularly bad by Spike standards, or even by Evan's. But, as he'd said, Reg wasn't him. Reggie was less braced (who wasn't?), less cynical (ditto), more tender generally (this, conversely, was saying something).

Besides, memories never were objective. Reggie's were patterns of wounds that, though not so bad individually, had been often enough repeated to make ground-in, unhealing sore spots, and repeated a few more hundred times. Seeing them through Reggie's mind, Severus had felt them through his feelings, unable to apply his own jaded callouses.

It was a funny thing about nerves. Too much for too long and they'd go numb and indifferent, but just a little for too long and every touch was worse and worse.

And, for Severus, feeling with more fragile feelings than his own hadn't been the worst of it. As might be expected, Reggie's memories were also completely full of Sirius Sod Him Bloody Black (a terrible way to feel about a cousin one had spent half one's life thoroughly enjoying, but Siri had earned it, and how). And it wasn't just Severus's feelings about him; Reggie couldn't think about him without love and fury and despair and not-actually-all-that-secret longing for the brother James Potter had gotten and he hadn't, all mixed up. And how did you scrub that out?

So Evan had made an executive decision regarding the bath oils. It was a decision that was getting less unusual, he noticed unhappily, and what if Severus acclimated? If they just stopped working—or, worse, he started associating those smells with stress and strain? Voicing that thought would not improve matters. So Evan made sure to never use the same set twice, and silently worried.

He didn't think he would have lost ten whole minutes to worrying, though. And the time had indeed flown off somewhere. "I did? Just the same? Every time?"

"With variations on content, though not tone, at the drawling-sarcasm point, yes."

"That sounds like a replicable result. What is it? Some sort of memory spell, I take it."

Severus tilted his head to look up at Evan, very serious. "Yes. When we're done talking, you'll be able to decide whether you want to remember it."

"…Oh, no." If Spike asked him whether they were partners again, or if he was getting to be a burden, or—

"Not personal," Severus reassured him hastily. "Politics."

 _"Oh._ Carry on," he said, magnanimous with relief, and then there was an interval wherein Spike evidently felt moved to express approval of Evan's priorities.

People thought they got used to the way Severus turned the sharp side of his tongue on them, thought they could acclimate. Then he did it again, and half the shock was no, no, they hadn't. That was not possible, and wouldn't have been even if he'd been less inventive. When he really lost his temper, he'd slash right into the tenderest places, the rawest wounds, the secrets that were supposed to be safely hidden, the insecurities that people were usually too polite to touch.

It was just the same when he used it in less venomous ways, the difference being whether you felt you were dying or wished you were. Either way you were struck (punched, lashed, stabbed, spiked) with the impression that death was going to be better than anything life had left for you, so spectacularly better that falling into it would be a weeping relief.

Later, Evan was humming all over with satisfaction, partly because Spike was curled up on him again, long limbs loose and warm. That was always lovely. After a while, as his mind floated contentedly back towards clarity, he remembered that there had been… what was it? "You wanted to talk about something, then?" he asked vaguely.

"I badly did," Severus said, his contented glaze turning to a headachy look, swollen lips pressing tight as McGonagall's in a strop. Not just a bad omen, that last, but a minor tragedy. "Ev, has it occurred to you that out of everyone we know, you and Narcissa are about the only ones who aren't either already 'round the bend or, as in my and Reg's cases, accelerating exponentially towards it?"

"Being a bit harsh, there, Spike, aren't you?"

"No."

"No, really."

" _No, really._ Name me just one of us who… who's coping with… with the more… with the 'training' Reg is getting without cracking up or rotting. Someone who wasn't a nutter or otherwise vastly disturbing already, cough cough Mulciber cough."

"You're supposed to actually cough."

"Sorrow." Evan bit his shoulder. Severus did shift and purr a little, but he pulled away almost at once, saying, "I mean it, Ev."

Evan sighed. Fine. He pulled himself up to a more seated position against the corner of the couch to show willing, and tugged Spike back. If they had to have unsettling conversations Spike thought he might not want to remember, he was _going_ to have his security blanket. So there."What do you mean, rotting?"

"I mean," he said grimly, "starting to like it."

Evan considered this. He, personally, was starting not to like this conversation. Severus could turn a Binns lecture or a sheet of potions instructions into a riveting saga, a bedtime story, or a wicked enticement (Spike had had far too much fun at Ev's expense in class after those study sessions, but he had to admit he'd definitely learned the material), but he wasn't sure he wanted to listen now. "I like my job."

"You're not doing anything you wouldn't have been doing without him, except passing on the things you pick up."

"It's good to like one's job, Spike. Reduces ulcers and that."

"When one's job is killing people," Severus said, so bluntly Evan winced, "hurting people, tearing their will away, no, it isn't. That is not a good thing to like. Liking to fight is one thing. Liking to hurt and kill, that's something else, Ev. That's not what soldiers do. They do their job for king and country, or for a living, or to protect something. Soldiers are butchers, not addicts! It has to die, so you kill it, what's next, move on. When it's about _liking the blood on your hands,_ _wanting_ the screaming, something's gone wrong. Soldiers know it. They don't trust the ones who like it. I have references. Lots."

"You and your references." He nuzzled in, but he wasn't happy. "Spike, nasty work like that, you've got to cope—"

"Traditionally, one copes by seeing the enemy as inhuman monsters or inhuman targets, not inhuman entertainment. Look hard, Evan. What are we doing? Are we doing something? I was told we were doing something; I was told we were out to make changes. Most of them are silly changes, but a start is a start, one has to overcome inertia somehow, and God, Salazar, Merlin, and Livia know silly would be an improvement on the way the government runs now."

"You know she wasn't actually anybody's goddess of bureaucracy, right?"

"She is MY PERSONAL SAINT of administration-creative-beneficent-pragmatic-ruthlessness-and-poison shut up," Severus said haughtily, and Evan laughed. Severus unbent enough to crook a moderately shamefaced half-smile for a moment.

Only a moment, though, and then he went on, grim-eyed again. "Well, I see you working towards progress, and Luke and Narcissa and that holy terror Rookwood, and a very, very small handful of others. And the older lot are managing discreet, at least; who knows what they're up to. But most of us? The ones we know about? Most of us really, really, _really,_ Evan, _really_ aren't making what could reasonably called useful steps towards a goal."

"It's preparation. In case the political influence path doesn't take. Besides, he wants the populace softened up," Evan said uneasily. "Unnerved enough to be receptive."

"Of course that's what he _wants,_ " Severus said with a raised eyebrow, "because that's, how can I put this, _sane?_ Strategic, anyway. _If_ one can get away with it. But is it what he's getting?"

"I hadn't heard it isn't," he said, careful.

"Talk to Narcissa. She's been putting out feelers, fretting to everyone about bringing a child into a world as dangerous as it's getting."

"I see." He was afraid he did.

Severus confirmed it. "We're developing a bad, bad reputation, Ev. He wants the populace softened up, wants to create a fear he can be the solution to? Fine. Well and good, in theory, but we're not getting away with it. And that's not bad luck. That's our waters fouled by the sloppiness of mental cases."

"You're talking about Bellatrix."

"Oh, for fu—for pity's sake," Severus said irritably, sitting up so that only their legs were tangled together. Evan blinked at his self-censoring. "Would everyone kindly please I beg you stop feeding Bellatrix Lestrange's megalomania. Yes, she's the poster witch, but she's not in the least alone or even the most loudly obsessive. She's just the prettiest."

Evan raised his eyebrows and said, "Lies. _I'm_ the prettiest."

This pulled an unwilling grin out of one side of Spike's mouth. "You're not the prettiest bloodthirsty cackler. Disqualified on at least two counts there, Rosier, I'm exceedingly pleased to have to tell yoummnnn..."

"I liked Schwarzrosiger," he mused dreamily, when Severus had pulled away from kissing him. He was absolutely the prettiest, although he was willing to share first place with Narcissa. Bellatrix was _beautiful,_ yes, but nobody with eyes like hers or Spike's could ever be called anything as mild as pretty, no matter what they looked like physically. He and Narcissa and Reggie could pass for harmless and even vapid any day they wanted to. Lucius couldn't, although his eyes were more eagle than swallow-the-world-whole. But he didn't seem to understand the value of being able to take more than one social stance, and was quite pleased to strike everyone as predatory and alert all the time."Or Schwarzrosen. Although, really, if anyone's a black rose here, it's you, Prunes-an'-Prickles."

"I only called you that because you called me Prince-Snape," replied Severus, back (regrettably) on-task. "Focus, Slick, I've been more and more at sea on this for months. Please don't drift off when I've finally found a safe way to talk to you about it."

"Months," Evan repeated.

"I… yes."

"Understatement?"

"Possibly."

"Possibly?"

"A bit?"

"A bit like an inch, or a bit like a Quidditch pitch?"

"...Er."

"...A bit like the entire village of Hogsmeade, inclusive of the castle grounds?"

"...I think we can exclude the lake and forest..."

"Which stand for?"

"First and second year?"

Evan started rubbing his temples. He supposed it was promising that his battering ram had managed to keep whatever it was to himself. And he couldn't blame Severus for not having wanted to share burgeoning dangerous thoughts with him in their third year. They'd been friends then, allies and even partners, but not intimates. Not even bed-friends, although competent Slytherins didn't mistake lust or even afterglow for trust.

No, Spike hadn't trusted him then. Evan had seen the way Severus had looked at him when they'd been getting closer: the same way he'd looked at Evans. A starvation too desolate to be called hunger, the bone-chilled weariness of a street dog promised a place by the fire, eyes shifting in jaded desperation between the bone and cushion and all the steel-toed boots and pokers.

Evan knew how secrets could grow and grow in stagnant inertia until sharing them was unthinkable even when called for. Still. Seven years there'd been love of one kind or another between them, or the seeds of it, trust growing. Five, even six years of Severus knowing full well that when he was cut, Evan not only cursed but bled. He'd been biting something back the whole time?

"Elucidate, heart," he sighed. He knew Spike would hear it as a rebuke, a sign that Evan was having to remind himself that usually he liked Severus rather a lot, and that at least he was being trusted now. Good.

Severus wasn't the type to apologize, particularly when he thought he was right. He might feel terrible about making you unhappy, but if he couldn't think he'd been wrong, if there wasn't anything he knew he should have done differently, he couldn't and wouldn't claim actual regret. He looked like that was the position he was in now, and was letting himself sound it. "I can cite you books or scrolls from every century with whole chapters about the sweet and sloping spiral of dark-arts dementia—"

Yes, the alliteration was a definite clue. He was properly squirming—and letting Evan see it. And he was supplying what he'd withheld as soon as he'd been able to. He'd not only looked for a way to bring Evan in as close with him as Ev had thought they already were, but when he hadn't found one, he'd invented a whole new spell to make it possible. So they really did want the same thing, and equally. All right, then.

Of course, if he was building his case around _the dark arts are bad,_ he deserved to be uncomfortable a little longer. "That stupid, catch-all—"

"Well, if you don't want shorthand, then—"

"I regret opening my mouth," Evan mourned, letting them go back to normal.

"As well you should." Severus gave him a deep, sweet kiss—and followed it with one brief enough to be a cheerfully, insultingly, obviously token effort to lessen his regret. Overdoing 'back to normal' a bit, but he was a congenital overdoer. Besides, after the way Evans had treated him one couldn't expect him not to grab at olive branches desperately and with both hands.

"Suppose," Ev proposed without much hope, "I apologize and say I am duly warned and you just—"

"Whole chapters, then," Spike steamrolled over him, grinning without even the grace to do it crookedly, "about the very strong correlation between a habitual use of malice-powered magic and a sharp turn towards decreasingly inhuman priorities. And about a similarly strong correlation between will-powered magic unstructured by verbal or physical foci and going a little or even a lot mad in ways that are called poetic justice by people who think it's wrong rather than just dangerous."

"Morgan's sheath, Spike, breathe."

Severus ignored him, adding pointedly, "And, finally, my entire school career may be best characterized as one long effort not to get murdered or worse in my sleep."

"Mulciber always was a bit er," Evan conceded.

"And Avery was happy to take his lead," he said sourly. "And let's not forget the highly political portions of the older years. Or most of Reg's year, come to that. Even after I'd accepted Evans was dropping me, even after you picked me up. Don't mistake me, I'm living proof that it was a school-wide epidemic, not a Slytherin one. Not even just a red-and-green one, the way people used to just stand about and watch," he spat.

Taking a deep breath with tight lips, he calmed himself, and went on. "But it _is_ an epidemic, this 'if you're not one of mine you're a chew toy, so squeak' attitude, and I see it worsening among our own. With consequences that are the opposite of what we're meant to be working towards."

"Does He know you're thinking like this?"

Severus turned wide, horrified eyes on him. "Are you mad? I have _no idea what to do_! There's a roc-sized flaw in our tactics, we're losing personal mastery and discipline—of which, as he's just reminded me, he's very much in favor. Additionally, we're weakening as an effective body and losing credibility with the public we want to win over! The way we're going, before long keeping our Marks hidden is going to be a mandatory safety precaution instead of making everyone feel smug about being in a secret and exclusive society. You think I'd bring that to him without at least a half-dozen possible approaches?"

 _"Oh thank Salazar,_ " Evan breathed, his hand closing bruisingly, shakily on Severus's thigh. Fret Spike too long and he'd go all Prince and Gryff-like and come home with bones broken and his eyes in the wrong places, snarling and seething because someone had ended his fight before he was done with it. You couldn't _do_ that with the man who insisted on being called their Lord. He wanted everyone stepping carefully, with him as well as in the world.

The grip wasn't enough, not with hands smoothing over him maddeningly feather-light in hesitant reverence when he wanted them tight and safe and grounding. He had to tug Severus close again, bury his face in the long neck and fine, lank hair that were home. Always home, even if they smelled disconcertingly floral and fruity at the moment, more sweet and soothing than their usual spicy, woodsy enticement.

When his heart-rate was down, his curiosity rose to replace it. "But, Spike, if Reg thinks Bella's teaching him to shield his mind…"

"That's got to be bunk," Spike said dismissively, instantly business again.

Completely and instantly business again, although a bare second earlier his hands and eyes had been, for some strange Severan bizarro-reason that doubtless made sense in his head and probably had to do with his really stupid self-esteem deficit, treating Evan like a priceless treasure made of eggshell and soap bubbles that he couldn't believe had fallen into his arms.

That was a potions wonk for you. Yes, that happened—and now it's focus-on-this time! Keep up and add the armadillo bile on three, or doom! Ev mentally added Whiplash to the list of names to poke him with at appropriate moments.

"Lay you any odds you like," he went on, "it's something she's doing to trick him into being more open or get around his nerves."

"Granted," agreed Evan. "But it lays open the possibility that there are people one might really be advised to shield one's mind from, doesn't it. And if _he_ thinks so, wouldn't it be more like him to look into learning how to do it, more than seeing if anyone can learn to stop it?"

"That would be more his style," Severus agreed. "Well, he'd want to do both, but," he lowered his voice a little, possibly on pure instinct, "I think he might just... sort of... assume no one could get into him. Of course no doubt he'd be right," he added hastily, eyes evasive.

Evan eyed him, and decided he was probably right whether he was actually voicing what he was right about or not. And that Evan had no reason know or even think about whether he was, and the less said out loud about it the better. "So the odds he can't read minds _right now_ are…"

"Terrible."

"Let's assume worst case, seeing as that's your favorite, rainbows and unicorn dew that you are."

"It is my favorite," Severus agreed, pulled unwillingly into a smile. "I mean, what? No! I embrace reckless optimism with joyous and fervent stop laughing at me."

It took effort, a very counterproductive scrape of nails up his sides, a concerted and distracting occupation of his mouth (and coaxing, and velvety, and just a little bit bitey, pulling him in), and some ferocious concentration on the fact that worst case would actually be quite bad, but Evan did, eventually, stop laughing.

"If he can read minds," he got them back on topic, pulling away with no little regret, "how exactly are you planning to keep this private?"

Spike shrugged against his chest. "Maybe I won't, or can't, or haven't. Maybe I'll find out soon I'm already in trouble for not having come to him with ideas, or maybe he's working on it on his own and not discussing it with me. Which is more probable as it's in no way, as they say, my department. All I know is that he hasn't mentioned seeing, not that he hasn't seen. But it's certainly not something I _let_ myself think about with him, or, really, have time for."

He twitched a little in Evan's arms, and Evan twitched, too, in sympathy. From what he'd said (and that had not been one of his flaily, hyperbole-prone moods), that afternoon had been _intense._ Harder and faster than any session he'd had with Luke's dueling tutor, scarier than almost ( _almost)_ anything he'd faced from those Gryffindor thugs, and several times worse than both revising for and taking his DADA NEWT combined. He'd been immensely proud of himself when he'd staggered home, but the shape he'd been in even before Reggie had horned in had scared the breath out of Evan.

"Well," Evan said, "I'll remember, if you please." Severus was visibly unsure about how to interpret that that for a teetering few breaths, looked at him uncertainly, then went completely limp on him for about the fifth time that evening, this time with relief. Evan tried not to laugh at him out loud again. "And I'll think about it."

"I hoped you would," Spike admitted, curling long fingers into his dressing gown. Despite the Rosier arms it was Spike's that was blue, in deep Ravenclaw colors with the Prince motto and white boar at the breast. Dark blue, while good on him, wasn't his very best color, and the thing would turn a wonderful wine color, but he was ridiculous and (tragically) refused to wear red. Evan's was also a family pass-down: meant to be used and so not an heirloom, but of quality too good to be called a hand-me-down. Preservation and repairing charms were wonderful things. His had a dark green leaves-and-thorns pattern, but no blue roses apart from the one in the Rosier crests on the lapels.*

"But."

Severus sighed. "Of course. But?"

"But," he went up on an elbow, "you'll remember this the next time you go insane and feel like asking me stupid questions."

There was a pause. "Not following."

Evan incompletely repressed a smile, looking down at him with a quirked eyebrow, and brushed a flop of hair out of his eyes. "Why do you think I let you decide I was your personal alternative to beating House problems over the head with a club bigger than you were?"

"Excuse _me,_ I used my wand."

"Which was bigger than you were."

_"Oi!"_

Evan grinned down at him, and kissed his nose. It really very nearly had been, the shrimp, and Evan was calling his titchy twelve-year-old self a shrimp as someone who'd played Seeker until the growth spurts had hit. "It wasn't for your gracious charm or rarified connections and enormous vaults, I assure you. Catching a problem before it explodes all over everyone is quite a lot of what you're _for_ , O naja-my-porcupine."

Spike quirked his own eyebrow back, asking with a humorous glimmer, "Oh, is that what I'm for?"

"Gobbing venom in its eyes before it's close enough to need biting? Safest way. Someone ought to. Everyone else is too prissy."

"Thank god we're not Hufflepuffs; I suppose I would have been our year's Skunk."

"None of that," Evan told him, still smiling but not humorous. "I meant it. No one sees trouble coming like you."

"He said something like that," Severus said thoughtfully. "He said 'needle eye, glaive tongue.'" After a moment, he blinked in a remembering sort of way, and chanted, " _Amitte incantatum."_

"I should be glad he's noticed," Evan mused, because he very much wasn't. He didn't feel anything with Spike's spell dismissed, either. "You deserve to have it noticed."

"I hate that word."

"Also 'fair'?"

"Also 'fair.' You're not glad?"

"Are you?"

"You mentioned seeing trouble coming. I'd wager galleons to gingerbread: that owl's at the window."

"Yes," Evan agreed, sighing. "That's what I thought. …I don't think your spell did anything, Spike."

"It wasn't supposed to. I would have finished it with _cludo_ instead of _amitte_ if you'd decided to forget."

"Or reacted so badly that—"

"Yes."

Evan was silent a moment. "You'd do that to me?"

An eyebrow slid up. "If the other options were so bad that it was my only chance of keeping us both safe, and..." He groped a little, finishing lamely, "Us?" The uncertainty only lasted as long as the search for a word. Matte-eyed and implacable, he answered flatly, "In an iced second, Lance."

The cold-blooded curl of Evan's faint smile matched the stony flare of his nostrils perfectly. "Good answer, Naj."

He was quiet for a while, again. Then, curling tighter, he said lightly, "You know, when I 'picked you up when Evans was dropping you,' which is a dreadful way to put it, don't again, please, you're not a fallen knut, everyone said you only went along with it because the names and gingerness confused you."

Spike sent him up a rueful piece of twistedness that only got credit for being a smile because it had the handicap of being his. "'Everyone,' how shocking, is a moron and should stop trying to be witty," he said. "One needn't be a brewer or an artist to know the difference between peach and copper, thank you—"

"My hair is not _peach_."

"—and the open wound of your name was half your difficulty."

"Then I wish I'd been a Tom, Dick, or Harry," Evan decided. Severus barely had time to gag loudly at the idea before being flipped, uncompromisingly and with a shout of startled laughter, onto his back.

"There's a Dickon in Nottingham with a bit of a pash for me mam," he said later, idle and sleepy, into Evan's hair. "Got my wand from him. Nearly put me off me stroke there, Ev; I always did wish she'd met him first. Besides."

Evan waited.

And waited.

And finally pinched him. "Besides?"

Gruff and uncomfortable, Severus grumbled, "I'll have you as is."

Evan didn't smile into Spike's chest: the smile smiled him. "You'll have to introduce me."

"I'll do that," Severus said softly. Strong hands gently turned Evan sideways, and Severus wrapped himself over his back. It had all the promise of a glorious awaking, if also a stiff-backed morning, during which he was going to pay absolutely no attention to the mantel clock. Evan hadn't failed Spike; he'd understood him on the first go. If the clock was wrong, if there had once been an Evan who'd fumbled the Snitch before Spike had worked out how to explain himself properly, it was kind and right of Spike to keep the shame of it from Ev. Because that Evan didn't matter: he was erased and well-erased. Gone. And there probably hadn't been one anyway, because he wasn't (he hoped) a _hundredth_ as empty-headed as he liked to look.

Now and for now, though, he, this Evan, himself, he found himself pressed snug into the back of the couch with an arm for his pillow. There were still-bruised lips soft and slow at the join of his neck, an unmistakable nose tucked behind his ear, and wire-and-bone shoulders unsubtly shielding him from the door. The throw unfolded and settled over them, that dreadful, ratty old thing Spike had nicked from the Slytherin common room and would never hear of replacing because it was 'still perfectly functional.'

That was one of Evan's favorite fights to pick, when things were dull. But when one of the Fudge kids had trodden mud into it once, he had, smiling and polite and gently understanding, sent her home in tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The crest of Muggle family of the same name (if there was any relation, the Rosiers didn't admit it) had yellow roses on a blue background. Blue roses, after all, aren't natural.
> 
> Severus is referring more to the character from Robert Graves' _I Claudius_ than to the historical Livia Drusilla/Julia Augusta.
> 
> Evan is tacking off 'prunes and prisms,' which oxfordreference.com describes as:  
>  _A phrase spoken aloud in order to form the mouth into an attractive shape, from the advice offered by Mrs General in Dickens's Little Dorrit (1857). From this, the phrase is used allusively to designate a prim and affected speech, look, or manner._


	18. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Marauders hold a council of war, to which Lily can't be invited for obvious(ly greasy) reasons.

James announced, "Something's up with Snivellus,"

"Water is wet," Sirius countered.

"I wish you lot would realize we've graduated," groaned Remus.

Peter just kept brooding at a bush.

They were hanging out in the Gardens. James's place was out, since Lily was never reasonable about Snape. Sirius had announced that, having been prodigiously productive (his words), he had completely earned the break of his choice, if not a full night out with loud music and oddly-colored drinks with fruit-salads in them, and was going to start chewing the walls if he didn't get out of his flat and under the sky for a while. Remus had suggested St. James so he could go grub around in the museum afterwards, but Pete had vetoed on the grounds of Too Crowded Too Noisy.

There had been something closed off and tight about his expression, but James hadn't wanted to press. Pressing Pete when he was uncomfortable already and Sirius was in the room was just asking for trouble. The more anxious Pete got, the more he fluttered and stammered and tripped over himself, and the more Sirius sneered at him, and it could just go on and _on_ like that. He wasn't like that when they went up against the Slytherins or played innocent with the professors, or even when they'd failed to and had to take it. Sirius rattled him, though, easily. And when James was too impatient, or the few times Remus had been disappointed in him, he'd crumbled almost instantly, and then it would be a miserable swing between sullen, humiliated retreat and horribly wet trying-too-hard for _days,_ until they could convince him they'd forgotten the whole thing.

They'd gotten some brilliant pranks out of Pete trying too hard, but one couldn't enjoy them properly with him sort of fumbling at one's robe-skirts the whole time. And he'd applaud _every little thing_ with this horrible forced grin, and it felt impossible to _stop_ , like juggling goldfish-bowls, because if you said 'stop trying' he'd go into one of the retreats again and it would just set the clock back and you'd have to do the whole miserable thing over later. Really the only thing to do with a humiliated Pete was give everyone something else to think about, so he knew you all really weren't thinking about him anymore. That was harder come by these days.

He'd had that _push on this and I'll fall_ look, so James hadn't. He'd offered the idea of Richmond Park, which Padfoot had liked, but James had regretfully had to put in his own veto. On the grounds of deer acted funny around him when he was two-legged and spring was the wrong time to tempt fate, shut up, Dogbreath.

Sirius had, when he was done with it, dropped his shiningly-innocent face and said that Kew had plenty of nooks and crannies for the cagey explorer, and the plants had signs on so Remus could be boring and post-academic there if he wanted. So here they were, sprawled out on enormous, squashy poufs behind one of the greenhouses, and also behind a Not My Problem ward.

"Pete?" James prodded. "I said something's up with Snivvy."

"And I said water is wet," Sirius said helpfully.

"And _I_ said—"

"Oh, sorry," Peter blinked, shaking his head as to clear it. "Are we playing Most Obvious or Two Truths And A Lie?"

"I'm not playing at all," James said crossly. "He's gone completely off-pattern."

"I really can't believe you're still following him, Prongs," Remus said tiredly. "Don't you have better things to do?"

"You and Lily," James said, annoyed. "He's a symptom. He needs watching."

"According to you, he doesn't do much _to_ watch."

"Well, he does now."

"Say on, MacProngs," Sirius invited, lolling on his back on his pouf. It had been an innocent pinecone five minutes ago. While it would be a pinecone again when they left, James thought it was probably scarred for life now, or otherwise corrupted. Might be interesting to see what sort of tree would grow out of something Sirius had rolled and wiggled all over. Probably a cypress, or something else equally phallic.

So James told them. Odd comings, odd goings. Apparating away from St. Mungo's, but not back to his flat, and no trace of him at his so-called friends' places, or any of the shops or libraries. Showing up on his street later and later almost every other day, increasingly looking like he'd been through a wringer. Weight loss, dark circles, a straighter back and a stride with its last traces of scuff and sidle snuffed out.

"And now he's not showing up at his lab," he finished.

The other three looked at each other. "All right," Remus conceded, "something _is_ up. Sounds like when you were having Jenkins train you up to replace him on the sly, Pete."

"Still don't know why you didn't ask us to do it, Pete," Sirius put in, upside-down and still, six years later, sounding a little hurt.

"Oh, you know," Pete muttered, "thought I'd surprise you if I made it."

Which meant, James knew, _thought you'd laugh at me_. Bracingly, he said, "It was only surprising you'd gone for it under our noses, mate, not that you got in."

That got him a little smile, and Peter said, "Remus is right, it does sound like that."

"We thought you had a snogfriend," Sirius said reminiscently. "Dead disappointing, till you got Sniv in the face that time." Remus kicked him, and he said, "What? It was. Glad to have you on the other bat and all, Tailspin, but we were hoping for eventual wanking material."

"Stay classy, Padfoot," Remus said dryly.

"You'll note you didn't get any even when I was dating," Pete crossed his arms sulkily, "seeing as I'm not a pig."

"And knew it would get back to her," Sirius noted.

"Due to Sirius's excess of tact," James chimed in.

"And Jamie's history of suave discretion in matters of the heart," drawled Sirius.

"MYYY LOOOOVE IS LII-IIIIKE A RED, RED ROOOOOOSE," bawled James happily, on cue. Because she _was_ , all prickles and silk. And who did she spread her petals for? That's right, it was _him_ , not any nasty, greasy-voiced, vicious little snake-sneaks, and there was their own rosehip swelling gorgeously apace to prove it.

"And hoped to get laid a second time," Sirius nodded approvingly, deaf and insensible to James's well-justified reverie, the philistine. "Sensible."

"I hate you all a little right now," Peter informed them, bright red.

"What did I do?" Remus asked, bemused.

"Wouldn't leave you out, Moony," he said, managing a grin and a fluttering of his sandy lashes.

"Well, Snivvy," Sirius said. He had the attention span of a chipmunk when he saw no reason not to indulge it. It was often useful when they were already off-topic. "I don't expect he's gearing up to try out for Holyhead, as amusing as that would be."

"I thought you said he gave you a challenge when they put him on," Remus said, vague.

"Er, Moony, the Harpies are an all-witch team," Pete told him, since James and Sirius were busy staring in such sad despair at his ignorance they couldn't even muster up the indignation to protest the obvious fact that they couldn't possibly ever have said any such thing ever ever ever.

"Oh," Remus nodded, indifferent. "That makes sense." Seeing they were still staring at him, he added placidly, "With the name and all."

"MOVING ON," Sirius yowled tragically. "So Sniv's finally slipped. Anybody found a way to blind-follow an apparition yet?"

"Siri, we can't just go ahead and follow him on our own anymore," said Remus patiently.

"Er," James blinked, as blank-faced as his best friend. "Why not?"

"Well, we did sort of promise not to."

"I don't remember this," Sirius said. "When was this?"

"This was the bit where Dumbledore said he was sure we would be a great help if he could _rely on us_ and we said he could."

"And that means we can't go after Snivellus when we finally have _proof_ he's up to something?" James demanded.

" _Yes,_ Prongs. Because haring off on a lead without reporting in is the opposite of reliable."

"Besides," Pete put in, looking a little twitchy at having to argue, "if he's in it as deep as you think, Jamie, following him without backup and a plan could end up with somebody dead."

"Oh, come on, we can handle—"

"Hold up, Prongs," Sirius said reluctantly. He had the _oh Merlin I hate my head sometimes_ look on, so James paid attention. That look usually preceded his more insightful and better-thought-out moments. "I hate to say it, but Pete's almost right. Yeah, we can handle ourselves, but that makes a fuss, and Dumbledore seems to be anti-loud-fusses for the moment. And you can see why, right? If we're the ones to start making them, we're the ones who look bad."

James looked at him, proud and resentful. It was _not_ what he wanted to hear. But after the scare Sirius had given them, nearly turning Moony into his own even worser worst nightmare just because getting within half a mile of Snivellus turned his brain into a box of lit fireworks even when sodden, James had resolved to encourage any evidence of maturity Sirius showed.

 _Any_ evidence. Even when it did make him sound sort of Slytherin.

"Thanks, Paddy," Moony said, with a little sigh-and-smile at the oh, fine, not a traitor _really,_ James supposed. It was lightly relief-flavored. "That was most of what I meant."

"I'm not Irish," sniffed Sirius for the twelve thousandth time. He'd never managed to get comfortable with other people's sincerity, which was probably why he and the Rose of the World (James made a note to call her that to her face, but not when she was holding her wand) got on each other's nerves whenever they tried to talk about anything other than work.

James dug into the ground moodily with the toes of his trainers, rather wanting to dig in with his antlers, too. "All right, report it in, then, but he thinks we're biased. What if he doesn't even believe me?"

"Tell Moody," they all three of them chorused.

"In fact," Sirius added, "make sure Moody's there when you tell him the first time. Saves argument. At least," he winked, with that long, sly grin that had always had three-quarters of the school doing their level best to snog it (and Snivvy doing his to claw it) off his face, "saves _you_ argument."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a whole different thing going on with Peter's fifth-year fawning until about five minutes before posting. I was reading him as so keyed up and anxious as to be nearly dissociative. It was going to be an important thread, if maybe not a whole subplot. Then I re-read the Snape's Worst Memory scene again to check it, and I'd remembered it wrongly, remembered Peter being much wetter and more icky than he was (I think in retrospect this is due to the picture Maraunerds by Makani, not enough of whose fantastic stuff from acciobrain has survived her move to DeviantArt). Then the James voice explained his side of things to me completely differently (wow does it not excuse him), and um... sometimes these things happen during the final edit? o.O


	19. The Three Broomsticks, Hogsmeade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hogwarts is out two professors and the Wolfsbane Project is very unlikely to get its grant renewed. Horace is sad and sympathetic, and would like another scone.

"I must say, Damocles, you seem to be making wonderful progress," Horace beamed, loading up his fifth scone with pineapple jam. "And on the lycanthropy curse! I should never have believed it if you'd told me five years ago; never."

"Aye, well, I only hope we'll go on progressing," his former student, one of his first, said grimly. "Way I hear it, them up at the Ministry are sounding _satisfied_."

"But you aren't?"

"Poor sods'd have to be mad to take it as is," Belby said. "And enough of them will be, if they take it for long. Bone spurs are the very best of it."

"They are often in most desperate situations, you know," Horace pointed out.

Belby snorted, "Know it better'n you by now, I should say. One of my ducks had to chase one applicant out with a silver rake, I hear—although Patil is an exaggerator. I expect the boy just threw a jar at his head."

Horace smiled widely, and topped up Belby's teacup. "And how is my scrappy black lambkin?"

"Taking his vacation time for once, thank Merlin." Belby rolled his eyes. "Thought I'd have to bully him into it, but I expect that pale-eyed fop of his did my work for me."

"Oh, dear," Horace said, fixing him with a curious, sympathetic look. "Severus always was prone to overdoing it."

"I never noticed him being prone to dropping things before," Belby growled, and netted himself a stare of gooseberry-green surprise. He nodded. "Oh, he's all right around the cauldron, but we're going through twice the coffee—and three times the mugs. And if he wasn't quick with his wand we'd have lost the precision omnioculars out the window last week when Lovegood padded up behind him on those cat feet of hers with a question."

"What were they doing by the window?" Horace asked with a blink. Even precision omnioculars could be used to see at a distance, of course, but what they were _for_ was seeing small.

"They weren't."

"Dear, dear," he clucked, eyeing the last scone. "Well, the Rosier boy was an excellent influence on him in their last few years. We'll have to leave it to him, won't we? I don't suppose you've been overloading him, Damocles?" He slid a knowing, nudge-nudge-wink-wink twinkle at Belby, quite different from the cheerful blue one of his employer. "Get in as much work as possible before the funding's pinched?"

"Not I," said Belby, shoving the plate at him with a jaundiced look.

Horace's heart fell, although he took the scone with a pleased smile and piled jam and cream on it with every evidence of complacent enjoyment. If it wasn't overwork at the lab, and since he hadn't heard anything to suggest that the most reliable of the Black girls was having another, er, health crisis, then it almost certainly was a Sign. He'd have to pass it on, and he wanted _nothing to do_ with Any Of That.

"Slow and steady and take the leaps in stride as they come, or you're scraping werewolf off the ceiling. And coffee, too. More time, that's what we need. And more coffee. Not a rush job." He eyed Horace with a sort of jaded hope.

"And it would be a shame if you couldn't get it," Horace agreed, with real indignation. Millie Bagnold had always struck him as short-sighted, although of course Ministers so often were. One persuaded a fearful and badly-divided public to vote for one with charisma and bright, broad strokes of meaningless energy, not clarity or nuance.

But the Wolfsbane project was wonderful. Could be legendary, even if it was only the first toddling step to a cure. It could, if it succeeded, open up a whole new population to enrich the wizarding world, free of the fear on both sides that now kept all that strength and sensitivity resentfully and insecurely caged away. Only think of what werewolves could do for the Aurors! For the exploring division at Gringotts! And so little could hurt them so badly that they couldn't come in to work the next week.

Yes, one unquestionably wanted them on one's own side, pissing out. Look at that odd Lupin boy, with his shuttered eyes and quick mind and that soothing way about him. Imagine what he could have been if he hadn't grown up living on his nerves, contorting himself into a twisted-up shadow to keep the silence and protection of boys who could be as vicious as they were clever, strong, resourceful, and self-absorbed. Or if his parents hadn't ransacked his birthright questing for miracles. Who else was out there with as much potential as he'd had, that no one knew about, without even what advantages Dumbledore had been able to give him? It wasn't only a shame, it was a shameful waste.

"And I shall say so, of course. But…"

"Oh aye," Belby sighed. Even Ravenclaws knew it, by his age: even when there wasn't a price, there was always a catch.

"It's a matter of timing, my boy," Horace said, some regret in his smile. "I _shall_ say so, make no mistake. But while I doubt Dumbledore will take much convincing to add his weight to the argument, I should be very much surprised if he has room on his plate for it in the next few weeks."

"I did hear as you'd lost your DADA twit again," Belby said, refilling both their cups. "Starting to think accepting the job shows a lack of qualification, I am."

"We lost more than her, this time, alas," Horace said gloomily. "You wouldn't have thought a Defense and a Divination professor would be fools enough to go for a tryst in the Forbidden Forest, would you? One would at least expect enough foresight to ask young Hagrid which areas are crawling with giant spiders."

"Well, that clinches it," Belby said, when he'd finished staring and grimacing and shaking his head in disbelief at _how stupid can you get_. "It _must_ be a curse, and a strong one at that."

"Yes," Horace said sadly, his eyes falling away. "I suppose it must."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A/N** : I, personally, cringe whenever Horace uses his we-want-X-on-our-side phrase. It just _seems like him_ to me, though. Something about being so old-boys-club and comfortable and genteel that it jars a little, but he wants it to. Because it's the sort of crass that his sort of gentleman probably wouldn't use in polite company when _quite_ sober, to give the impression that he's quite, quite... relaxed, m'boy... (tries to work this out) Anyway, he just keeps using it.  >:\
> 
>  **For the record** , getting rid of the in-the-way professors in a manner whose stupidity strains credulity was a deliberate choice. It was based on a combination of Albus's choices about Quirrell and Severus's behavior in PoA. While it seems clear that the Mirror of Erised setup was meant as a thief-trap meant to _contain_ Quirrell until Albus could XYZ (exorcize the poor guy, hopefully!), I don't disagree with Harry that Albus wanted to 'give him a chance.' Given the thus-far observed effects of Lily's spell, that was likely to sacrifice Tom's hostage, Quirinus. As it in fact did. Albus certainly has a ruthless streak, but being willing to risk the life of a young man who (however willing he may now be to cooperate with his possessing torturer; it's called Stockholm Syndrome, people) may _or may not and most likely did not_ ask for any of this for in order to promote the character development of an eleven year old, so that said eleven year old can become a killer with some successes under his belt by twelve? That's pretty damn cold, and I don't say 'even for him,' because he's not usually _a tenth_ that bad. IMO.
> 
> And then, in PoA, well, there were plenty of other factors working on Severus, even if you want to consider them to be independent factors. Dementors on the grounds. PTSD-inducing colleagues and circumstances. People had been knocking his head around and he almost certainly had a concussion (it's amazing he didn't die of second-impact syndrome, in fact). The promise of Real Social Recognition snatched away from him, and thereby Slytherin, because Albus yanked the rug out again in favor of that family-gang of murdering psychopathic thugs, _just like last year_. Nearly getting eaten by a werewolf, _again_ , along with _children_ this time, because of Black, _again_ , because said werewolf is a careless, spineless _flake_ who can't remember to take his antipsychotics when they're sitting right in front of him.
> 
> It's a fairly breathtaking vortex of factors, when you think about it. One really can't wonder that he was off his head. We've _never_ seen him act like that. I posit that the curse, having fixed on him as the mechanism by which it would get rid of Remus that year, had to work _really hard_ to get him hysterical enough to forget himself to do it. 
> 
> And once I've formed that theory, the working assumption becomes that the curse _does_ , when necessary, work _really hard_ to get any given DADA professor out by the end of the year, and may be subtle or not subtle at all, and might do anything from clouding someone's judgment twelve miles away (at the Ministry, say, as they considered whether Aurors or Dementors would be better guards for a school full of adolescents...) to rotting the timber in a roof beam. You know, at Hogwarts. Where there's presumably maintenance magic of some sort. Because it's, y'know, a thousand years old. With elves.


	20. The Hogs's Head, Hogsmeade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Albus has two posts to fill. He doesn't like conducting interviews at his brother's inn, but that's where the Divination candidate is staying, and the Defense candidate didn't mind. Albus doesn't consider the latter a serious contender, being very young (and, as Albus recalls, a trouble-magnet and liable to castle-rocking temper tantrums), but interviewing Slytherins is always good fun.
> 
> Or: Severus's job interview doesn't catch him _exactly_ the fish he was angling for...

"I confess," said Albus, "that your owl surprised me, Severus."

"Did it?" the boy asked. He wasn't trying for amazed, Albus noticed, or even surprised. A good choice: he did skeptical much more naturally.

"Should I not have been?"

Severus shrugged. "I would have expected Professor Slughorn to anticipate me, if you didn't."

"Why so?" He did enjoy interviewing Slytherins, and got the chance so seldom. Teaching wasn't the sort of ambition most of them understood as valuable. Too, the difficulties associated with his most often open position tended to warn them off.

When they did apply, their struggle between Never Volunteer Information and the necessities of auditioning for a job was always good fun. As a student, he recalled from talkings-to past, Severus had seesawed savagely between pressure-cooker taciturnity and explosions of the bare and brutal truth as he saw it.

But, of course, their meetings had never been under the best of circumstances. Horace had maintained staunchly, if without enthusiasm, that what Albus had seen was nowhere near the whole. More, it was only a certain portion of the students (if a large one) who thought darkly of the child, not any of the portraits or elves or the younger students in his House he could easily have bullied. A strong mark in his favor, although he'd made much of the faculty uneasy and aggravated. Filius had liked him almost without reserve, though, and Minerva and Pomona had approved of his bloody-minded (Minerva), tenacious (Pomona) refusal to give up in their classes.

Severus frowned a little, as if Albus's surprise was very odd, and offered with an air of attempting diplomacy, "Perhaps if you'd tell me what surprised you I'd be better able to answer."

"Well, to begin with, my boy," Albus began, and immediately twinkled. There it was already, a tiny flash of temper in the dark eyes. He picked up Severus's CV. "Why interrupt such a promising potions career?"

Now Severus looked more naturally surprised. "Interrupt?" he repeated. "I'd hoped to come to some arrangement with Professor Slughorn regarding stillroom access. He used to let me brew during Slug Club meetings, so I'm sure we could come to an agreement. I understand that marking and lesson preparation are time consuming, but I've never needed much sleep. And it would be disingenuous to pretend that the Hogwarts library and equipment aren't a draw."

"But why leave Master Belby, Severus?"

The boy looked thoroughly cynical and, to his credit, also depressed. Of course, he had more reason than most to want the curse of lycanthropy defeated. "I might have waited until we know whether the grant will be renewed before applying, if I didn't think you'd want to fill the post as quickly as possible. But there's not as much hope to hold out as Belby wants to think. _We_ don't think the potion's viable for distribution yet, but I'm afraid the Ministry will. And he won't be able to afford stipends enough for us to live on without that grant."

"Ah, yes, Horace did say," he murmured, and dug out a Honeyduke's tin. "Pepper Imp?"

"Hm," Severus mused, quirking a nearly conspiratorial eyebrow at him. "The discourtesy of rejecting an offer, in opposition to the risk of setting your beard on fire. An interesting assessment tool."

Albus laughed, and had one himself before putting the tin away. He blew the spout of flame safely into the corner (possibly sterilizing it), and allowed himself to form it dragon-shaped.

"Yes, all right," Severus said, flushing a little. That was more the child that Albus remembered: quick to see nuance and quick to think himself attacked, and always feeling it keenly. "I'm sure you _do_ have more experienced applicants. But I wanted to offer my mindset. I'm told it's an unusual one, even within Slytherin, and I think a year's practice in it could be useful for…" His lips tightened. "It's getting tense out there," he finished simply.

Albus wondered whether he knew how true that was. "Since you raise the matter of your mindset, Severus," he said mildly. Severus gave a very small and quiet laugh and a ruefully acknowledging half-shrug. A good sign, Albus noted, but only looked on with benevolent interest until his candidate realized he was supposed to talk.

"It's a matter of vision," the boy said. He'd stuck to his point instead of taking the bait and getting defensive about his temper or the thousand poisonous rumors that had choked his schooldays. Albus was moderately stunned. He was less stunned to notice the ironic and, again, nearly conspiratorial quirk with which Severus acknowledged his reaction.

"Are you a visionary, Severus?" he asked, smiling with a benign twinkle and a leaden swoop about the heart region. Some of those rumors had been absurd, and some credible to the point of inevitability.

Severus sat back in Aberforth's hard and hard-used chair with a frown, evidently giving this some hard thought. "I wouldn't have called myself that," he said slowly, after a brief interval during which Albus amused himself with an ice mouse. Two, rather: one he ate, and he let the other run about on the chipped varnish of the table between them. "Can you..."

The mouse began to melt quickly in the stuffy nearly-summer air of the second-floor room, struggling on slushy feet. Severus looked at it, and then at Albus. His building expectation quickly became incredulous, then a veil of bitter resignation drew over his eyes. He drew his wand and vanished it. A narrow-eyed, low-lidded look struggling between suspicion and judgment, and then he finished, a little harder about the mouth. "Can you be a visionary and a pragmatist?"

"All the great ones are," Albus assured him. That reaction, too, had been a good sign. Minerva and Pomona had both called him out for cruelty verbally at that point in their interviews, while Filius and Silvanus had felt it necessary to make a comment about the mice of course not being real animals. Bathsheba had picked it up, dusted it off, and eaten it, saying something vague about a sudden inexplicable bad taste in her mouth. She, he recalled, had also been Slytherin.

The question, though, made him sad, rather. Melancholic, at least, in a way that wasn't really appropriate to the setting. Still, such reminders were always as tempting as they were painful. He always wavered on them, if just for a moment, even now.

Severus eyed him, seeming to sense the looming minefield. "I also," he said, veering away from it effectively but without grace, "wouldn't call myself paranoid."

Albus choked on his mint. The boy nearly rose in alarm, but settled back to wait him out in tolerant, only slightly sulky _yes, fine, laugh at me, I knew you would_ resignation, once it was evident he wasn't in any real difficulty. When he had conjured himself a glass of water and drunk it, Albus said, slightly hoarse from all the coughing, "In that case, Severus, you might be interested to see your student evaluations."

He got back a wry and crooked half a smile. "I doubt they'd surprise me, Professor. But there's a difference, I would say. A paranoiac notices things that could be strung together to tell a story of trouble and then believes it, no matter how unlikely it is. I rarely see only one story, and I'm a brewer. I don't pin my expectations on one possible outcome unless it's by far the most probable, and I always, always, _always_ prepare to be wrong."

"But you do make interesting connections, Severus," Albus said. "I don't believe I've heard that one before."

"But you must live it, Professor, as an alchemist," Severus said, tilting his head curiously. "An unknown quantity or combination always has the potential to do something disastrous. If you assume it will, you don't make discoveries. If you assume it won't, you go through a lot of lab equipment, and sometimes limbs. Even more so with alchemy than ordinary potion-making. The proper course is to use sturdy equipment, have spares and cleaning supplies handy, ward yourself, record your planned procedure exactly, do the experiment, and if it turns the ceiling furry, write down the result and work out why. Isn't it?"

Albus agreed that it was. "And you want to teach the children to apply that to DADA?"

"I want to teach them to apply it to defense generally," Severus said, his mouth a little grim. "Observation, the rules of logic and critical thinking. The application of research. Noticing there's an unusual bulge in someone's pocket, what could make that shape? Are they the sort who'd think to disguise the shape of something in their pocket? Are they known to associate with anyone who is? Someone's got an odd look, what known factors would suggest an innocent or dangerous explanation. Noticing that _every century_ has reams recounting the effects of using the Dark Arts, but only in every third or fourth generation. And what could make _that_ shape."

"What _could_ make that shape?" Albus asked, smiling.

Severus shrugged again. "The explanation that seems most likely to me is a cycle of grandchildren and great-grandchildren not… not understanding the reality of their ancestors' difficulties, not understanding the strength of the causal relationships, and making old mistakes again. I don't insist on it, though."

He nodded. He had seen that happen, and not only about the Dark Arts. His friend Nicholas could be rather waspish on the subject. "You said 'a year's practice,'" he mentioned.

"I did." There was another brief pause. Albus let himself enjoy it, increasingly visibly, until Severus remembered again that he _was_ , under these circumstances, supposed to offer clarity. "Comes under 'prepare for the worst,' Professor," he said, with a little shrug that only moved his eyebrows. "Maybe there is a curse, maybe there isn't. But the body of evidence suggests that attempting to stay long in the post is a bad risk." He looked rather like he wanted to add _no offense_ for a moment, then set his jaw stubbornly against it.

"Honest as always, Severus," Albus mused. Severus just looked at him steadily, composed again, comparatively open and entirely unapologetic. "Just one or two more questions, then," he said. Neither of them would have to do with the very recent graduate's actual qualifications. His NEWT was still the best verifiable testament to his facility with the subject matter, and it had been more than high enough to get him in the door.

Asked the first question, Severus made a loud noise of disbelief. "Are you joking?" he asked incredulously. " _Yes_ , I have experience with children. I thought Professor Slughorn was at least on the pulse enough to know that! If you hire me I ought to get _back wages_ from all the tutoring, good grief. And you can't seriously think—I mean, the faculty didn't honestly believe that Evan Rosier did all his prefect work himself!"

"Didn't he?" Albus asked, smiling with real amusement now.

"Oh, _please_. Er. Professor. Get up in the middle of the night to settle squabbles and nightmares? Rosier? If he doesn't get about nine hours uninterrupted he walks into walls and hexes all the witnesses. And he was far, far too liable to artistic reveries to keep an effective weather eye out on fifty-odd little sneaks and insecure bullies and walking nerves at the best of times. During OWL and NEWT study? Not a chance. He went to meetings, he swanked the badge in public as appropriate, and he had the conversations I told him needed more tact than I had or more weight than a penniless halfblood could give them. The end."

"Dear me! We considered making him Head Boy, you know," he said, to see how hard the boy would explode. Severus's feelings about who his year's Head Boy _had_ been were common knowledge.

"I wish you had," he muttered, eyes black in more than color. Then he sat straighter in the chair and repeated more distinctly, "I wish you had. That job's more inter-House diplomacy than micromanagement or babysitting. He would have been excellent at most of it, and Narcissa and I would have gone on filling in the gaps his counterpart didn't."

"Slytherin teamwork," Albus mused. What a strange concept.

"Slytherin values a social orientation and creative problem-solving, as Gryffindor values individuation and direct engagement," said Severus. "Slytherin is supposed to be as much about teamwork-when-called-for as Hufflepuff is. The difference is their emphasis on putting one's back into it as opposed to our focus on moving thoughtfully. And that they don't question whether working together is actually the best way to go about any given task."

Albus could see he believed it, but smiled kindly and provoked, "Well, I am encouraged, Severus. A compliment to Gryffindor, and you got it out very nearly without grinding your teeth!"

"I'm glad you feel that way," the boy said, droll, "I think, but it wasn't a compliment. It was an observation, or, if you prefer, a distillation of research, without assignment of positive or negative value. That's what I do."

"Do you? Why not Ravenclaw, then?"

" _I_ don't know, the stupid Hat wouldn't let me," he groused, an old grudge overtaking his face. It made him look very young, not at all professional, and much more familiar to Albus. There was a spark of humor in it, though: it was the look of someone for whom complaining was performance art and who expected barely-veiled appreciation or possibly score-cards, not of someone who crawled into bitter bottles alone. "Said I had nosing-in bones and would probably set their tower on fire three times a week shooting fire extinguishers at other people's experiments that would otherwise be fine. Whatever the hell _that's_ supposed to mean." He rubbed his nose, scowling with rueful resentment.

And then, Albus recalled, the two of them had argued silently on the stool while hundreds of young stomachs growled. It had been several long minutes before the Hat had started smoking along its brim and hurriedly consigned him to the snake pit. They had both, as he remembered, had a distinctly _so there_ expression as the boy had walked to his new table. "But they don't really work like that, you know, the Houses," he told him gently now.

Severus slid Albus a dour _I obviously know that, who do you think you're talking to_ look that nearly made him laugh again. "Reality never works like it's meant to. That doesn't mean the ideals don't exist, or should be binned. It just means keep trying, try harder, work smarter, pull more people into your…." He smiled a little again, still crookedly, "vision."

"Speaking of ideals," Albus said, taking another ice mouse. Severus looked at him for so long, waiting for the question with only curiosity in his eyes, that Albus gave up on delicate suggestion. This was unusual, and, even more unusually, he wasn't in the least sure what, out of the several possibilities, to make of it. "I admit that this isn't a question generally in an employer's purview, Severus. However, as you observe, it _is_ 'getting tense out there.' And I must ask you—"

"—In view of the hyperactive rumor mill, fueled by gold cap mushrooms stewed in fwooper blood, which is commonly referred to as Sirius Black's brain…" Severus inserted, flat and unamused, anticipating him. No one (even while tearing their hair out over his lack of common sense, social judgment, self-mastery and penmanship) had ever said the boy was dim.

"I'm afraid I must take a certain interest in the politics of any adult I consider bringing into the school at this time," he said, as unchallengingly unapologetic as Severus himself had been minutes ago.

Severus gave him a twist of a smile under the oldest, bitterest look Albus had ever seen on a face that young. Albus had lived through battles and shellings, Minerva's first year on the faculty, that appalling near miss of young Remus's, poor Hagrid's expulsion, Minerva's first year as his deputy, the caging, dwindling, and forgiveness of his brightest love, and his brother's undying blame.

For the first time, the Slytherin picked up the teacup Aberforth had perfunctorily plonked in front of him when escorting him in. He drained it, pulled out a pocket watch of some dull metal, and sat in silence for precisely the longest amount of time Veritaserum could need to take effect (if it wasn't prevented) before putting the watch away.

"An estimable gesture, Severus, but it's only tea," Albus said, smiling a little sadly.

"Is it? You let me wait," Severus said bluntly. Albus wondered whether that was the placebo effect or just Severus being Severus.

"A demonstration of good faith should always be respected."

"Mm," Severus said, eying him dubiously. He rearranged his shoulders and met Albus's gaze directly.

To the old Legilimens' surprise, he didn't have to work at not falling in; his mind's gaze skated over an impression of dense smoke tangled so smooth and tight he nearly bounced. Unsophisticated, untutored, and unintended. In fact, he had the feeling Severus was trying to communicate with him, from behind that slickly snarled surface of guardedness and generalized mistrust.

He'd never seen it before, but it could have been there as far back as the boy's first year, as far as he knew. Every other time they'd met, Severus had been wildly distraught or sunk in sullen, miserable defeatism. Albus had never, in fact, seen him meet anyone's eyes, except to lock together in hatred with his enemies, for longer than an agonizingly incensed or disinterestedly dull split second that no one had to be a mind-reader to feel on their skin as a silent scream.

Meeting his gaze now, Albus could see that he was that rarest and often most unfortunate of animals, a natural whose talent wasn't mere latent potential. Like every occlumens who was introspective or an artist, his shield was unique and complex, full of sensation and interest. Like every life-activated natural's, it was strong. Nevertheless, it wouldn't have taken nearly as powerful or experienced an old hand as Albus to punch or even to slip through.

But the boy was barely graduated. From where Albus was standing (somewhat creakily, alas), he was barely weaned. He couldn't know what he was trying to open himself to.

So Albus listened only with his ears and the eyes of his body. They generally sufficed.

"I'm not political," Severus said. "There's no _point_ in my being political. I'd be bad at it."

Albus twinkled hugely at him at that. Severus sent back a twist that might have been a smile if had been less wry, making no bones about it.

"I hear all the arguments, Professor," he went on soberly. "I have friends all tangled up in the Ministry, and I have friends treading their pure blood like water against the riptide of change and, oh," he gestured wryly, "loud music, and power lines crossing the ley lines and so on. And they're terrible complainers, as rich people are." He shot Albus an ironic look and added, "savin' yer presence, guv."

"Oh, quite, quite," Albus chuckled. He thought about taking another pepper imp, as a winking mock-reproach this time rather than a tool of curiosity. Despite the current display of confidence, though (a calming draught before coming in, perhaps?), he knew the boy to be nearly the dictionary definition of skittish, and not just because Horace and Pomona had kept on telling him. Another gout of flame would be overkill with any Slytherin worth his salt, and this one wouldn't believe it was a joke.

"And I think that nearly every problem with our society and attitudes and laws that I've ever heard anyone point out is a genuine problem. But _absolutely_ every solution I've ever heard either side of the argument propose is ridiculous, short-sighted, poorly conceived, and much more likely to have a hugely unfortunate ripple effect than to do a lot of good. So," he shrugged, "until I hear or have an idea that's likely to do less harm than letting things stand—which you'd think wouldn't be as hard to come up with as it is…" He shrugged again, making a face. "Politics is for people who think they know the answers, not the ones who just see an endless mirror-maze of questions. I try to anticipate the problems, and come up with better tools to apply to them. That's as political as—"

Albus's watch chimed.

"—I get," Severus finished, and blinked.

"What excellent timing," Albus beamed. "That will be my next interview, I believe. I have two posts to fill this year, you know," he added, and, reminded, let the sorrow sweep gently over him again. Death was nothing to fear, but it separated friends. Nor would an an Acromantula's territory have provided a pleasant route.

"I heard," Severus said, wincing, and stood. He didn't offer his condolences, but Albus felt the wince was a more honest speaker of sympathy than any polite words would have been, from him.

When they were both up and on the same side of the table, Albus took both the boy's hands, not just the offered one. "I have others to speak to, you know, and I may ask you or others for a second meeting before making anyone an offer. But, Severus…"

He looked earnestly, warmly into the blackly-endless, roilingly misted-over wells of eyes that were walls and not windows. "Whether, in the end, it's yes or no, I've very much enjoyed speaking with you today. Professor Flitwick has always said you have a fine mind, and I shall be delighted to let him tell me that he told me so."

Severus's eyes widened, just slightly, and his sallow skin turned rather pink.

Albus twinkled brightly and mischievously, with a bit of innuendo in it to see if he'd redden more. He did, and bits of his face he was trying to hold still twitched, but it looked like confusion rather than embarrassment. No young crush on the teacher who'd liked him best, then, ah well. Life couldn't be all fun, and Albus supposed it was good for Minerva to win a wager once every few years.

But there was this: _I'm not political_ was a truth, crafted to pass through Veritaserum, which told Albus _nothing._ Had been intended not to. _Neither side has my enthusiasm_ didn't mean he'd been able to avoid a choice. These careful truths, Albus greatly feared, told him what his young followers' report didn't (despite their most enthusiastic certainty) prove. The painstaking nothings told him everything.

But on how many levels could this Slytherin think? On how many would he expect Albus to? He'd _assumed_ Veritaserum, just for an interview for a teaching post. Or had he, rather than assuming it, meant to signal that he ought to have had to? Could Albus have been that lucky? Probably not (almost certainly not), and yet... what was ever accomplished in the world, except by serendipity or hope? I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know…

It was the head of the Order who gambled on, still holding the cipher's eyes and hands tightly. "I should enjoy speaking with you again, Severus," he said gravely. "If you should ever care to come by and chat," his hands tightened. The black eyes widened slightly again before narrowing in focus to match Albus's intensity. He said, slow and quiet and with emphasis, "You will always find my window open."

Below the polite expression, Severus's pulse pounded clearly and suddenly in the unveiled vein at his throat. It jumped so hard and fast that Albus could feel it hammer like a rainstorm in the rawboned fingers in his iron grip. There was one breath more shallow than the rest, a moment's tremor in the thin lips, a vulnerable, unsure flicker in the shine of the eyes that might, really, have been a merely a flicker in Aberforth's most economical lighting. One deeper breath, while Severus met his eyes piercingly, searching as deep as the body's eyes could touch. Finally, finally, a steadied gaze and the most miniscule of nods.

Then Severus took his hand back and polite-smiled at him with the kind of pitying respect that was dutifully put on for batty old relatives. In a perfectly normal humoring-the-senile voice, he asked, "Beg pardon, Professor—did you mean 'door' just then?"

"No doubt, no doubt," Albus said cheerfully, and let him go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Severus hears something he shouldn't. Yes. THAT. Ready? GO!
> 
>  **Credits** : "Everything that is done in the world is done by hope." —Martin Luther.  
> Yes, Albus is making a Peter Pan reference. No, broomless flying is not a thing at this point.


	21. Still the Hog's Head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus hears something he should not have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : a bit of regional stereotyping. And I'll just refer you back to the Canon Compliance note at the beginning here, the one about about discrepancies with things Harry thinks he knows...

There'd been the supper press at the bar, so Abe hadn't personally escorted the nervous and frizzy-haired sparrow of a witch up to his brother. When things cleared up, he still hadn't seen the lanky kid from before her come down or leave.

Not just a lanky but a Lanky lad, he judged, from the way he'd been chatting at the bar before Al had gathered him up and he'd tightened up his posture and vowels. Wherever the boy was from, he had no business hanging about after his own appointment was over, but Abe would have expected a Northern kid to have _stuck_ to his own business, kept himself to himself. Especially with a nose like that; he would have gotten hit with every joke under the sun, growing up.

Something not right there. Had his fingers been stained? ...Yes, but not with ink. Abe headed upstairs.

The kid was still in the hallway, sitting splayed against the wall like a string-slashed puppet made of forest shadows. Aberforth stood in front of him for a good few seconds before he gave up and cleared his throat. Black hair that wasn't even trying slid away from a skinny, beaky, cheese-colored face as it rose to look up at him. The wheyish cast was new since he'd gone upstairs. That long-cuffed, willow-colored shirt and stark pine-needle waistcoat hadn't really been doing him any favors even before he went all shocky for whatever reason, and the grey, unseasonably chilled light from the windows wasn't helping.

"Looking to rent a room, were you?" he asked. "Register's at the bar."

The kid stared through him for a minute, then blinked and focused, although he still looked rather blank. He took a long breath, pushed it out shakily, and informed Abe, "Your brother is bloody petrifying."

"Full marks," he agreed sourly. He noted (with, just at the back of his mind, a bit of a smirk), that the lad wasn't putting on any high-flown public-school airs for _him._ Yet he'd been impeccable for Albus, and Abe had seen him about the village as cool-eyed as any velvet-robed pureblood, mussing the Black heir's hair, turning him bodily away from Honeydukes and towards the bookshop with an air of poorly-concealed amusement and getting sulking compliance instead of hexed for his trouble. And he knew Al was Aberforth's brother, even through Abe's dull robes, carefully grimy specs, and the growl his Godric's Hollow accent had subsided into? It was a choice, then, not unthinking contempt for the surely low-class barkeep?

He should bring that to Al's attention. He even might, if Al didn't get on his wick too much this evening. That kind of decision was different from letting someone maybe hear what was going on in a room he'd rented, though. You had to be reliable, the kind of establishment he ran. "Now, unless you were planning to polish the floor with your—"

Abe had been stampeded by goats once, and this was very like that. There was the scrambling, scalded-cat vertical leap as the kid (appropriately startled but inappropriately badly, in Abe's view) very nearly clawed through him to get behind him. And there was the impression of thunder, too, as a voice that didn't belong to anything human rocked the hall.

He grabbed the unresisting wizard by the arm and back and hustled him away as soon as he realized what was happening. The both of them were shocked silent by the booming onslaught, apart from the grunt that moving a full-grown wizard, however skinny, pulled out of Aberforth. But the voice didn't roll over them for long, and by the time he got them out of earshot, it had finished. Had tolled out far, far more than he would have preferred either of them to hear.

He also wasn't best pleased with the way the kid, a scant handful of seconds after quiet fell again, unfroze in the middle of the stairs and started wrenching away and snarling for Aberforth to let him go.

Naturally Aberforth did no such thing. They were both going to need obliviating. It wouldn't be long; the door upstairs had already slammed open, probably due to the unholy bruising thuds they were making, falling all over each other down the stairs.

Standing, horizontal, or sideways, the spindleshanked young wizard had no chance of pulling out of the barman's rottweiler grip. Certainly none of getting away before the running footsteps arrived. When he realized it, Aberforth's arms had barely been wrenched open for a split second by what felt like an _expelliarmus_ before the brat had vanished not only out of Abe's hands but out of his pub. He was gone before Albus had made it to the top of the stairs, trailed by the frizzy-haired and now deeply confused-looking witch, and Al was not dawdling.

The ringing the _crack!_ of apparition left in Abe's ears was nothing to the heart-slamming realization of how close he had just come to being side-along splinched by an unhinged (if perceptive) infant. And even that wasn't the main thing here, not nearly. Albus was _not_ going to like this.

Abe didn't much care, as a rule, whether his flash, glib, careless, arrogant, over-powered, color-blind sod of a brother liked things or not. For once in his self-centered, self-certain life, though, Al would have the right of it.

If he tried to be _understanding,_ or act like this made them _even,_ Aberforth would break his nose for him again.

 

**End Book I: May 1980**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Lord Voldemort is given a great deal to consider.
> 
>  **Temporary Notes** : This is the last chapter of the first part—which I know has been a slow roller, and I'm sorry about that. I didn't realize what the pace would be like, when I was looking at it all on one page, and I guess my beta didn't, either. Not that I really do actionplottygaspthrillers anyway, but now we've got the Dun Dun Catalyst out of the way I think it should pick up? Most chapters from now on should have Plot Advancement, anyway, whether or not it's immediately obvious. I know, I know... 21 chapters in... n,n;


	22. Book II: June 1980: Undisclosed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lord Voldemort is given a good deal to consider. In terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad handwriting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warning** : UNRESTRAINED GEEKOUT. 
> 
> **Reminder: Canon compliance/Disclaimer**
> 
> It is advised that the reader be familiar with the biography of Harry Potter written by Ms. Rowling. The reader should be aware that this seven-volume series was fact-checked by Ms. Skeeter rather than Miss Granger, and cannot be relied on in the matter of dates. Furthermore, Ms. Rowling's books are written from the point of view of the subject, and not only contain a distinctly pro-Gryffindor bias but largely confine themselves to what Mr. Potter saw, heard, assumed, and speculated.
> 
>  _This_ is a Slytherin story, and truth is subjective.

**Valley of the Shadow**

**Book II**

**JUNE, 1980**

Undisclosed

Lord Voldemort was not pleased. He had expected a brief line of code that would have told him of his servant's success or failure. Instead, the note the owl had brought read, once translated, _Results inconclusive. Unexpected developments. Report to follow analysis._

He did not want an analyzed report. If something unusual had happened he wanted to see it for himself, while the memory was fresh, whether the information was time-sensitive or not. Analysis, if required, could follow. Furthermore, he'd just groped his way through an update on Rookwood's work at the Department of Mysteries, and Rookwood's truly excessive overuse of jargon was a mere drop in the bucket of its incomprehensibility. He was in no temper for further Ravenclawishness.

And now after all his patient understanding in refraining from jerking the leash on the little twitch, Snape hadn't even come himself.

"I entreat you, my Lord, not to blame Severus for my coming in his place," was the first thing Rosier said. Intelligently, he said it from a bent-headed, kneeling position. "He was shaken and rather knocked-about when he came home, and couldn't sleep, and since then he's been working on his report nonstop. He'd had trouble sleeping before undertaking his mission, as well. My Lord, he wasn't fit to present himself to you. I had to knock the mule out before he started hallucinating."

"You take a great deal upon yourself," Voldemort said coldly.

"I do, my Lord," Rosier agreed, his head still bowed. "I believe him a resource too unusual to be allowed to burn himself out in his eagerness."

Since that was essentially why Snape hadn't been summoned the moment his highly unsatisfactory owl had arrived, Voldemort exercised, again, equally unsatisfactory restraint. He had no illusions that Rosier had acted primarily for his lord's benefit, but demanding that any halfway-intelligent Slytherin act from only one motive would only win you a look as uncomprehending as it was offended. The important thing was to keep track of what wasn't politely admitted to. "You are fortunate to be in agreement with me, Rosier," he said, therefore.

"My Lord, I am thankful for it."

He probably was. This one didn't need the personal touch to keep him faithful, or even faith. His oath had been sincere, and under no illusions about its permanence.

It had also been utterly pragmatic, unemotional, a milestone on the path of least resistance. A legacy, Rosier knew that this service was as much a part of his family duty as his brushes and pigments. He didn't require passion, fear, or courting. Unlike many of the other highborn purebloods who would be more trouble than convenience to control through pain, he could be dealt with in a businesslike manner. Indeed, he became so vaguely bemused when treated in any other way that the Dark Lord had several times been tempted to curse the skin off his unjustifiably supercilious face anyway.

"But do not," he continued, still icy, "so presume again. It is not yours to decide who comes before me, or in what state." Rosier bent his head further, deeply enough that his eyes were hidden. Voldemort emphasized, "I should have received a full report the moment Snape's interview was concluded."

"Yes, my Lord," Rosier said, looking up now. "That's the reason for the delay; a full report was difficult to make. In fact, I shouldn't be surprised if, when you see it, you'll prefer a little more delay for the sake of a more legible copy. But I didn't wish to presume twice. "

Despite himself, Voldemort felt a muscle under his eye twitch in glum anticipation.

In fact, Snape's handwriting was perfectly legible. It was, however, the writing of someone who'd grown up writing small and cramped to save paper, stretching out his ink supply with water. More, it was the writing of someone who'd been raised in a lather of anxiety about his impoverished place among princes, and so was on the pretentious side of spidery.

Worse, the boy disagreed with the rest of the world on the subject of what margins and the spaces between paragraphs were for. Previous lengthy reports, especially ones written in excitement or under pressure, had been uninterrupted grey tracts of close, spiky, and excessive verbiage, not all of it facing in the same direction.

None of this amused a Dark Lord whose immortality research had not yet had achieved all his goals, and who was fast approaching fifty-five. His vision was perfect, damn it, it was just Snape's infantile insistence on trying to make his hand keep up with his brain and inability to wrap his head around his new ability to afford stationary.

The thick roll of parchment Rosier handed him was even worse than usual. If Snape secured himself a place where he could keep an eye on the old man, Voldemort was going to have to do something about it before he went. The slightly over-detailed updates on the lycanthropy palliative's progress were already bad enough. Regular doses of this would be intolerable.

He looked at the forest of poorly-organized ink-spiders. When he turned back to Rosier, he found that his agent had the gall to be giving him a look of pure, rueful empathy.

Actually, though, Rookwood's handwriting was positively muggle-medical, and his report had been even longer.

And at least Snape _tried_ to use language which could be understood by a non-expert without hours in very specialized libraries. Once he'd kept it up for nearly four inches. Rookwood's missives, while always overtly dutiful, never failed to relay the clear message that understanding them wasn't even the bare minimum of what was needed to retain the Unspeakable's attention. Unfortunately, they were useful too often for Voldemort to be willing to cut that problem off before it developed. He'd need to bind Rookwood to him more closely before correcting his attitude.

He'd had what were surely only the first of the June owls, too, from his followers with children still at Hogwarts. He was getting more of them every year, as apparently House rivalries were getting worse and worse. They all begged his understanding for their need to step down their activities for anywhere from a few days to a month to attend to their children. The question of whether or not he could do anything about it was getting decreasingly subtextual.

It was a bother he didn't need. His youngest cohorts were full of potential, but it was, with a few exceptions like Rosier and the Goyle clod, vastly undisciplined potential. Molding them into reliability was taking up a great deal of his time.

He didn't particularly enjoy being reminded of his lack of influence within the castle, either. Had the interview gone well, or hadn't it?

And before the annual unpleasantness of the letters, there'd been the fallout from young Wilkes' wandering hands, _again._ And before _that_ he'd had to give instructions not only to Malfoy, but to a Malfoy who was going increasingly insane, and compensating for it with extra haughtiness, the closer to birthing his child his partner-agent drew.

And when he was done with this nonsense, he had an interview with the werewolf. Greyback might well turn out to be a worthwhile resource, but he was the sort of both literally and metaphorically unaromatic piece of distastefulness with whom his well-born and haughty rank and file were not going to want to be associated.

Speaking of whom, once Greyback had gone he was going to have to try, once again, to explain the concept of subtlety to the Carrows. But they, at least, wouldn't rebel against his overt displeasure. Once done with them, he would have to try, _once again,_ to explain why he valued discretion to the three Lestranges, who were constantly champing at the bit, while young Black drooped at him out of their shadows like a wounded puppy. Irritating, when Voldemort hadn't been wounding him intentionally. And he would have to think of something to do about that, as well, and the sooner the better.

At this point, he felt a little sympathy might not be entirely out of place. So he decided not to have seen any he would have had to punish.

He looked back at the scroll, whose unrolled gap was showing some text near the middle. It had a lot of subheadings, and the phrases 'possible homonyms,' 'possible interpretations,' 'and 'historio-mythical precedent' were sprinkled thickly throughout. One very long paragraph was dedicated to 'possible interpretations' of the phrase 'the seventh month.' That was obviously July—and what did July have to do with a post that would begin in September?

Snape, though, seemed to think it might _mean_ September, seventh in name if no longer in sequence, or the seventh month after May, or even after June since his interview had been so late in the month. He wrote that it sometimes meant a birth seven months after a wedding (not uncommon, the man from an orphanage knew), could be an arrival seven months after the embarkation of a voyage, 'most likely by water, see below.' And there was more.

In fact, there were another three paragraphs dedicated to the 'historio-legendary supports for the interpretation/transcription into English of the word pronounced bɔːn as either 'born' or 'borne.'' They, presumably, were what he was meant to 'see below.'

Incredulous, he gave the parchment a broader scan, and yes, he'd been right. His servant (who should have his dedication acknowledged, yes, but who also needed, badly, to sort out his priorities) had actually gone and found the phonetic transcription and alternate spellings and meanings for every word with anything like a homonym in whatever he was quoting. Unbelievable. Surely 'defied' and 'deified' weren't mistakable for each other, even aloud, particularly for someone who'd successfully upgraded his accent? Even a quick perusal made it clear that the whole thing was like that.

And nothing in it looked like it had anything to do with the sort of job interview a young wizard still called Riddle had ever smiled angelically through. Certainly it read nothing like his meeting with Dumbledore, nearly thirty years ago, about the very same job.

He let the report roll up again with a slap, and sighed. Tapping it with his wand he made a duplicate, which he handed back to Rosier. He'd have to plow through the original at once, but one never got the whole sense of a Snape effort on the first read-through. The boy's teachers had probably all given him Os without reading his work as a matter of course, in sheer self defense (in case he came by during office hours to argue over a lesser grade). Damned if he was going to wade through this pig's ear twice.

"A more coherent copy, yes," he said. "And more concise." Seizing the day and delegating, he added ominously, "And, Rosier, he is to write it out himself. In _Palmer script or copperplate_. I have come to the end of my patience with," he moved the scroll a little in his hand, "this."

"I shall be _delighted_ , my Lord, to convey your instructions," said Rosier, whose wolfish grin underlined the sentiment.

That was an odd answer to an implied threat, so Voldemort raised an eyebrow.

"Hours and hours sitting down peacefully copying lines?" his man elaborated, the dreamy tone badly matched to his machete smile. "Very meditative, my Lord. Restful. I shall select the music most carefully. Just what he needs. Shall I owl you when he's restored enough to throw the blotter out the window?"

The Dark Lord gave Rosier a chilly look for speaking frivolously, but allowed himself a very brief moment's idle speculation on who wrote the shopping list in that household and who had to decipher it.

Then he stopped procrastinating, and dived grimly into the tedium from the top. He left his servant on one knee while he read. He might have questions, and Rosier usually needed taking down a peg.

His disinterest and disapproval exploded, as if struck by lightning, two paragraphs in.

Once again, he let the scroll close, and this time he slipped it into his robes. "I see."

He saw.

Snape should have rushed to his side at once. It had been even more wrong of him to not come, under these circumstances, than Voldemort had thought him wrong for not reporting in at once to begin with. The boy had overstepped by thinking the choice was his. Voldemort would have words with him about it.

But in this case, they might be only words. This time he wouldn't fault his dedicate too strictly for picking completeness over speed. No, he shouldn't have assumed the choice was his, but perhaps his choosing was not, after all, as wrong as it had first seemed.

Prophecies, after all, could be tricky. Particularly ones that spoke of a person with an ability to do something they might not decide to do unless provoked.

In fact, when he read the scroll closely, later, he found that the cautious, pedantic little beast had given him a full ten inches of his 'historio-legendary examples' of exactly 'that paradigm.'

And then there was a tangent about was it reliably confirmed that all prophecies came to pass? Snape would certainly, Lord, if desired, investigate the hypothesis that only the ones that were fought against were realized, as many sources posited (a further list, which at least had the grace to be crammed sheepishly into a margin).

Then Snape had actually, Salazar's wit preserve them all, apologized for not being able to find any counterexamples on short notice. As though Voldemort _wanted_ the wretched, closely-written briar-patch to go on longer.

But it grew ever clearer that this entire effort of his man's was an attempt to dissuade, without acting so above himself as to advise his lord unasked, against rushing to act on it at once. Every crabbed and prudent word was an alarm bell, following the screaming air-raid siren of the time it had taken to get to him: _we do not know what this is. We cannot know what this means_.

Worse than the intrinsic slipperiness of prophecies generally, the boy hadn't even heard the whole of this one before the wretched barman (who, Voldemort knew, would make two of his servant and was tough as old briar root) had started jerking him about by the wand arm and growling loudly in his ear and hurling him downstairs.

That was enormously unfortunate, but it didn't seem to have been preventable—although Snape would have to learn, before long, to move faster and fight more intelligently against more powerful opponents than himself when he couldn't draw his wand. His schoolmates' accounts were of a feral-cat style of fighter that relied on slashing, damaging hexes, projectiles, and wild, brute force wherever he could fit it in. Force was no fit tool at his weight class, and no fitting weapon for a Slytherin regardless. Voldemort would certainly have him taught better.

No, not certainly. There might well be no point to it. After this incident there was little to no chance of Dumbledore letting Snape anywhere near him. Still, he was shaping up well, and might be almost as useful on some similar mission.

But this, this. This was worth the loss of that plan. This was even worth the time he'd have to spend over it with a magnifying charm.

But he wouldn't do that anywhere but behind his strongest wards. And so he pinned Rosier with his eyes, pushing his mind in gently enough to escape notice by a non-practitioner, deeply enough to catch what Rosier might choose to keep back. "Summarize."

He was infuriated to find his probe skating over a disinterested color analysis of the clearing as Rosier spoke, interspersed with idle speculations about what Voldemort's dagger would cook the man for dinner and then do with him later in bed, and what tedious piece of drivel they would read together before sleeping. It wasn't punishable unless he wanted to reveal his legilimency. That was an intrusion he wouldn't expect his aristocratic forces to swallow quietly before being rather more tightly bound to his fortunes than they were now. Not punishable, and yet it was _not to be borne._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next:** There is a great deal of kidnapping, which can ultimately be blamed on Sir Not Appearing In This Chapter (aka Lucius). Then, Peter kindly does not take advantage of a drunk Slytherin in a pub.
> 
>  **Chapter notes:** That's right. I made the Prophecy all about why Harry didn't recognize the Prince's handwriting. SUCK IT, JK—I mean, that was wrong of you, Severus, very wrong indeed…
> 
> No, despite Tom's failure to fly off the handle immediately, this still is not an AU. We don't even know, canonically, when he heard it, or when he decided he knew who it was about, let alone what he might have tried before the Pettigrew/Fidelius plan. Rowling's sandbox is the best to play in (after all of anime) precisely because she left us this freedom.
> 
> Yes, the discrepancies between Aberforth's experience and Rosier's account are intentional. Just as the ones between Aberforth's and Sibyll's were.
> 
>  **Credit** to Judith Viorst, author of the book the summary is a tribute to. I thought it was fitting. Tom's having that kinda day. n,n


	23. St. Mungo's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Herein there is a great deal of kidnapping, which can ultimately be blamed on Sir Not Appearing In This Chapter (aka The Platinum Peacock, the Ball Python, That Flash Albino Ponce with the Pimp Cane, and, right now, If You Ever Think About Coming NEAR Me Again I Will Castrate You With Severus's Fingernails After He's Been Disemboweling Leprous Toads With Them, Don't Tell ME He Doesn't Do That, HE WILL IF I TELL HIM TO, YOU BASTARD.
> 
> ...She'll get over it.).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : ginormous geographical/cultural patronizing Anglocentric ignorance, included because of my firm belief that (forget Riddle) Binns is almost solely responsible for the ruination of Wizarding Britain.

The lab-witch hadn't touched her, or even spoken above a soft smile. Nell Warrington felt shoved and tugged anyway. What on earth could one of the potions labs want a Maternity healer for, anyway? The possibilities were dreadful.

When the girl waved (pushed!) her through the door, Nell was hit by the shriek of a banshee, and backed automatically into the witch behind her.

"It's only a Howler," the lab-witch said tranquilly, adding with vague interest, "I didn't know they could run this long."

Her colleagues, all male, were backed against a wall. The craggy, stocky wizard and the darker-skinned and (far) more appealing of the two younger ones were staring at the flapping, swooping red envelope like stunned cows—although the older one looked more like a bull turning the idea of charging over in his head, slowly. The third was beating it off with a notebook, looking pestered rather than threatened, and bellowing a stream of abuse back at it to the tune of _I said I'm not a midwife, you daft bint!_

"I don't think she minds, Severus," the other witch mentioned from behind Nell, without emphasis.

"And I know," the exotic wizard put in with a very beautiful smirk, seeming to recover a bit now that _someone_ wasn't screaming, "she can't hear you."

Continuing to thwack at the Howler, which seemed to have come to the end and started over, the hawk-faced wizard told him, "I certainly hope not." He turned to look at the witches in the doorway and said, "Lovegood." He didn't add, _thank Merlin,_ but it was there in the fervent way he breathed what was presumably Nell's kidnapper's name. "Qualified for delivery?"

"Oh, yes," Lovegood replied serenely before Nell could gather herself enough to be offended and/or terrified. If the wizard couldn't tell the difference between Healer and interns' robes (respectively lime-green, so that any blood would show up starkly and no sleep-deprived medic would be allowed to walk into an operation in unsterilized robes, and white for easy bleaching, both spelled to start glowing painfully in crowds and bad visibility as soon as anyone yelled 'emergency') he had no business working in potions. Nell was all for not letting being dealt a bad hand get in one's way, but if he was colorblind he shouldn't be allowed around cauldrons.

And if he wasn't, he could go climb a tree! Every mediwitch in Maternity was delivery-certified. Where did he think he was, some higglety-pigglety wattle and daub shaman's teepee in the wilds of Timbuktu, where the medics got paid in potatoes? This was St. Mungo's!

"Kit?"

The Chinese-looking witch hadn't Nell given time to fetch her portable emergency kit, the only thing he could possibly have meant, or even told her it was needed. But the witch calmly held it up for her colleague to see, and then handed it to Nell. She stared.

"House call, Healer," the besieged lab-wizard said grimly, and tossed her something he'd been holding in a napkin.

It was a spoon; a quite small one. Nell turned it over blankly, looking for a clue. It looked paler than silver ought to; was there a hint in that?

"Hard luck, old man," said the exotic wizard, commiseratingly. "Reckon she wants _you._ "

The all-over-edges one growled out a brief string of renewed profanity, and then turned to the older wizard who was probably, under normal conditions, in charge. "Sorry about this," he gritted.

"Daresay you are, my lad," the craggiest brewer said, with an eyebrow lift that promised understanding, permission, and penance to follow.

"What do you mean, house call?" Nell blurted, clutching her kit to her chest. The spoon dug into her palm.

But the wizard was already striding over to her, stripping his lab gloves off and dropping them into one of the enchanted sterilizing tubs St. Mungo's had in every room. His bony hand closed over hers, too hard, and then the portkey spun them both away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, Mali does have historic wattle and daub housing, but that was a totally lucky guess on Nell's part and, of course, incompatible with the teepee bit, which, um, wrong culture, ethnicity, continent... Timbuktu's economy is largely based on rock salt and its agriculture is mostly rice, which is made possible by irrigation. They do not appear to do potatoes. I know this because of Wiki, but it makes sense. Because, um, desert. You can do rice in basically water, but potatoes need actual dirt.
> 
> As I said in the warning, Binns is destroying the world. Not even singlehandedly. _He's doing it without hands!_ Respect, yo, man is talented.


	24. The Green Lion, Amesbury, Wiltshire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter kindly does not take advantage of a drunk Slytherin in a pub.

Pete nearly backed out of the pub when he saw the flop of black hair bent morosely over a drink: he was not in the mood for Sirius today. Or anyone. Had come all the way to Malfoy territory just because he wasn't likely to see anyone he knew. His own lot wouldn't come to Wiltshire for fun, and Malfoy's crowd wouldn't come to drink in a public house.

They wouldn't, he reminded himself, they just _wouldn't_. Prefer the impossible to the improbable possible, that old Greek bloke had said, hadn't he? Something like that. It wasn't Sirius at the bar, surely.

And if it was, well, he'd remind him that Pete's department liked to check on Stonehenge periodically, to make sure no one had been mucking about with it. And if Sirius decided to help (impossible to lay odds on whether the Mercurial Mutt would decide to be really-quite-helpful or implacably-self-involved at any given moment), Pete would have saved himself time later.

He was getting used, in a dull and unpleasant way, to people edging away from him. At least it won him some room at the public bar. Because his life was working this way, these days, _of course_ he ended up next to the one he wanted to avoid.

For a moment, he thought it really was Sirius. The fellow's hair was shorter and straighter, though. He was shorter himself, and more slender about the shoulders, pretty in a half-moon way where Sirius was punch-you-in-the-face rock-star gorgeous.

You had to acknowledge that, even if blokes didn't do much for you and you knew perfectly well how annoying he was. Once you'd swallowed it, you could start looking for the girls who didn't bother to look very long at the boys who looked like Sirius. And start telling yourself they were more interesting anyway, and then generally find out that even if 'more' wasn't right, 'interesting' was. As was 'somewhat less likely to play horrible, cruel games with you, either for fun or to entertain Sirius.'

When the pale, oval face rose without interest to see who Pete was, it fell at once, with as much dull, resigned displeasure as Peter felt himself.

"Er… hullo, Black," he said awkwardly. Because, even while looking at him sullenly, Padfoot's brother just didn't seem as unwelcoming as everyone else.

"You," Black said, glaring, a little cross-eyed. "You're one of those Gryffie thugs. Give me one good reason not to blow your spine out your arse."

Pete's eyes widened—not at the threat; you expected that from Slytherins, although not usually such a bald one. No, it was the language that both startled and gave the game away, coming from such a prig. Well, that and the slurring. "How about, you're so drunk you'd probably turn yourself into a spiny blowfish instead?"

Black considered this, his grey eyes narrowing in unfocused concentration. Finally he pointed a well-tended finger at Pete and announced, "One half a tenth a piece of a point to Gruff And Dim."

"Gryffindor?" Pete suggested, signaling the publican for a round. It seemed the thing to do.

"I mean you stupid bloody manesforbrains, 'swhat I mean," Black scowled at him. He probably meant to be fierce, but it wasn't working.

"Well, thanks," Pete said, and, receiving his pint, lifted it. "Cheers."

" _Ha,_ " was Black's dark reply to the notion of cheer, but he drank anyway. "What're you doing here, anyway?"

"Just wanted to get away for a bit," Pete said. It had been silly of him to think that anywhere would be 'away' enough. People all around him were shooting him unfriendly looks, paying, and making their way towards the door.

"I will," Black enunciated as though it were very important, "drink to that." He did.

"You seem out of sorts yourself, if you don't mind my mentioning it," Pete ventured.

Black swilled the drink around in his glass morosely. For a long time, Pete thought he wasn't going to answer, but then he asked abruptly, "You have cousins, whatsyourface?"

"No…?"

Black leaned forward a little, with almost exactly Sirius's I Will Now Impart To You The Secrets Of The Universe face. The only difference was, he wasn't making it for a lark.

That, and he had only half Sirius's cheekbones and chin, and a much less angular jaw.

"Do not," Black told him, earnest and careful, "have cousins."

"Too much trouble?" Pete asked.

Black gave him huge, expressive grey eyes and said, "Girls are _cats_. Claweachother's faces off. Jealous as all… as all... as _anything_."

"Oh, yeah?" Pete asked, sympathetically.

"Imean," Black said. "What I mean to say is, all fussed and shrieking about not getting asked when she doesn't even want it, right?"

"Not _quite_ following you there, mate," Pete admitted.

It took some untangling, but after a few minutes (and another round of drinks, Black having more or less slammed back his first pint) where Pete thought someone was getting married and choosing bridesmaids, it turned out to be about, well, the follow-up of that.

"An' then Spike threw a _fit_ and he said all no no no no no and all," Black said, gesturing expansively with his glass in the approved manner. "On account of he does that, and Luke said he showed a proper reticence an' humility, on account of Luke is a _slag._ "

Pete choked up a lungful of stout trying not to laugh, because he hadn't thought Padfoot's prissy little brother even knew words like that. Besides, Malfoy absolutely was a slag—although complimenting Snape, however ineptly, only actually proved him to be an idiot with bad taste.

"An' Spike said reticent hell, he wasn't going to find himself responsible for some squalling infant who expected satin and caviar and all when Luke got offed for smarming at the wrong whoozit."

"Yeah, okay," Pete conceded, reluctant to give Snape credit for sense, but well, yes. Anyway, he wanted to keep Black talking. You didn't get a line of sight on the nasties like this every day. And Black wasn't as nasty as most.

"So _Cissa_ said don't be silly, Ev would help, and he said like fun Ev would, because," Black looked at Pete earnestly, "Ev is a lazy sod, you know."

"Oh, really?"

"Very, very, very yes," Black said, sloshing his drink emphatically. "So Cissa said they'd make sure he couldn't get out of it, then, and _so,_ " he gave Pete the patented Black Tragedy Eyes. Oddly, his actually meaning them made them less effective than Sirius's. "So. So."

"So?"

"SO," Black repeated, catching his train again, "Bella isn't going to be godmum. And, what I mean is, _girls._ "

"Ah."

"I mean," Black said helplessly. "Bella."

"I hear she can be a bit intense," Pete allowed.

"You shut up about our Bella!" Black demanded, stung, and then paused. "Wait… what did you say?"

"I just said I've heard she can be intense," Pete repeated meekly.

Black appeared to think about this very hard. Finally, he said, "Oh, well, fair play to you there."

"Cheers," Pete said again, and bumped his glass encouragingly.

"I mean," Black said morosely, " _loud_."

"I hear you."

"Picking a wizard over her." He shook his head in disbelief. "And a cousin when she's her sister. Anna _mudblood._ Imean. I mean, _Spike,_ but," he pointed sadly at Pete, "irrifootable. Mudblood. Half-an-half, could be worse, but. Bella."

"Ah," Peter uttered solemnly, internally rolling his eyes. He knew he wasn't a pureblood by the Blacks' standards himself, even though his parents were both wizards. Whether he'd qualify to be called a mudblood, at least out loud, was a completely open question, and might depend on factors such as the barometric pressure and whether their eggs had been overdone that morning.

"Should have had more consid. Conseration for the rest of us," Black complained. "Evenif she does think it'd be romaaaaaaaaaaantic to host a handfasting. Because, maybe, but never happen. Because Spike."

"Yeah?" Pete asked, trying not to sound too interested.

"Well, _you_ know," Black said, rolling his eyes. "And, and, I mean, _Bella_ , am I right?"

"I'll take your word for it," Pete gambled, disappointed and praying he was erring on the side of tactful.

"Shouldn't be both of them in one flat, either, really, I mean to say. All your eggs in one thingy."

"Basket?

"That's the one!" Black stared into his pint for a while and then said, morose again, "'Sa stupid name, too. Gran—Grandi— _obvious._ Get him teased like anything, you know it will. An' what if he ends up in Huff An' Puff? Blow the whole House down! You think it makes them mental, witches?"

"Could be," he agreed cautiously, on account of not knowing what the hell Black was talking about at this point.

There was some more mournful staring into Black's glass, possibly because it was empty. Then the younger wizard slid off his seat, a little bonelessly. He patted Pete companionably on the arm and said, "You're all right, whatsyourfoos. Don't tell Spike I said so."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Pete promised with perfect truth. No. Imperfect truth. He suspected he was now going to have nightmares about telling Snape that. Possibly in front of Padfoot. Still, it might make a welcome change from—

He took another fast gulp of his drink.

Black was swaying, reasonably gracefully, off towards the back. Presumably there were toilets there. Pete took the opportunity to throw fling some silver and flee.

A few carefully ticked-off minutes later, Regulus checked the room cautiously before heading back to the counter. "Did he pay you enough, Pearce?" he asked, settling back onto his stool.

"More than, Master Reg," the publican assured him, adding with a shudder, "It'd cover something a mite stronger than that butterbeer-and-coffee, if you'd like."

"No, thanks," said Regulus, who usually drank out of vessels considerably shorter than his head. He rather felt he was sloshing every time he moved. "And it wasn't as bad as all that. That was clever of you, coming up with it on such short notice. It was just the right color."

"I have a cask of it pre-mixed, actually," Pearce told him. Answering his surprised look, "And a couple of juices that can pass for wine. There's a few of the regulars like to come and spend an evening with their mates like everyone else without making a production of not wanting a real drink. Or wanting one too much, if you see what I mean. Sure you won't have one yourself?"

"It might ooze out my ears," Reg said. "But I would like to borrow your owl, if you don't mind."

Reg didn't have quite the head for codes and the like that many of his housemates and family (including his brother) did. It still wasn't long before Pearce (only a little confunded) was pocketing a generous gratuity and the note was winging on its way. Translated, it read:

_Regarding P.P.: initial amiable contact established. R.A.B._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : All parents mess their kids up a little. In most cases? Not as badly as horcruxes would.
> 
>  **Notes** : I quite see why most people assume Narcissa would have bent/caved to Bella's expectation it would be her, but I have every faith in Narcissa's ability to wiggle out of it without causing mortal offense. And I saw nothing in canon that gives us a reason to think she wouldn't have wanted to. Even if she'd liked Bella as much as Bella seemed in HBP02 to think she had (which I doooo not buy), wasting the chance to gain a strong ally as a familial protector for your child by giving the role to the boy's blood-aunt is Bad Game of Alliance Strategy. The blood-aunt is already family. You get that ally secured and committed even if you have to sort of spend two slots on him, if he's strong enough and you know he'll take it seriously. Especially if that aunt, really? Wouldn't.


	25. Heald Wood, Lancashire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All parents mess their kids up a little. In most cases? Not as badly as horcruxes would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Temporary notes** : I meant to post Monday, but there were some Car Issues that left me stranded AFK all day. XP On the upside, this solves the problem of whether to post the rather short chapter five with chapter four, with chapter six, or by itself...
> 
> Happy V-day, whatever kind you're celebrating! And for those of you who are within like a hundred miles of me... stay warm and dry do not put your backs out shovelling. This is what they call 'heart attack snow' or 'shovelling concrete.' And for god's sake if you're in a southern state and not used to the snow you're getting STAY OFF THE ROAD, OKAY, PLEASE, BE SAFE! And remember that after it rains in winter there is sometimes black ice, which is, like sneaky nasty Bella black, not bouncy puppyish Sirius (snowball fight) or sulks obviously at you till you pet it Regulus (maple snow) or is equally obviously dazzlingly awesome at you till you dutifully admire it Narcissa (icicle fringe) Black. It is waiting to get you. Sidewalks + friction = love.
> 
> _This public service announcement was brought to you by CONSTANT VIGILANCE! Severus tested, Moody approved._
> 
> If you are not aware of this fact, mulled cider floats are even more awesome than hot chocolate floats made with french vanilla or some other richer-than-vanilla ice cream like butter crunch. Which are pretty awesome, especially when you've been shoveling.
> 
> _That public service announcement was brought to you by Evan and Reg's approval of Severus's kitchen lunacy._

"I don't know why you didn't just come to the house," Eileen said.

"I like it here," said her son, "and I didn't want to give myself an aneurism not-cursing Da. Besides, it's a good chance to build up my stores. Yours, too, I expect."

"Any of those would have done on its own," she noted, sitting down on the blanket he'd spread out.

"Yes, well. Once challenged, err towards overkill."

She looked at her boy, stretched out taller than she was in the sun-dappled shade of the bluebell wood. She hadn't felt herself passing through any wards or shields on her way to him, but that only meant she was welcome—as well she should be, as she'd come at his asking. There were wards, all right: his eyes were closed.

He was skinnier than she'd have preferred. From the look of the skin under his eyes, not getting enough sleep, either. Neither of those things were news. His clothes were of a better quality than anything she'd ever been able to put on him, but nothing fancy, nothing embarrassing. Clearly custom work or transfigured to fit after he'd bought them, because she'd never seen anyone go about with their cuffs stiff to the elbows, and there were far too many pockets tucked cleverly away into the seams of his frock coat, too many straps with subtly embossed runework telling her practiced eye they were wizard-space sheaths. Nothing, though, (it was exactly like him) that wouldn't let him fade out of sight in a crowd (if he put a hat on), or here in these quiet trees.

His face was quiet, too. There was a stillness in it, a looseness to his fingers. They made her, just for now, forgive his arrogant young menace his every smiling threat.

"You and that Evans girl used to come and play here."

"I don't want to talk about her."

"What do you want?"

He turned over on his elbows, smiling at her crookedly from under his hair. "The moon and the stars and for you to chuck the Neanderthal out and let me buy you a damned wand, Mam. You could pay me back, even."

"Best settle for the stars," she said, dry as the dust that choked her streets. He laughed a little, quietly. "You didn't call me here to ask me that."

"No." He rolled back onto his back, and waved at the basket. "I didn't ask you here to comment on my cooking, either, but I'm told it's etiquette to do business over a meal, so help yourself."

"You and your tinkering," she said, but she found a packet of what looked like scones, and reasonably safe. It wasn't bad, although baking sausages into scones should have gotten him stricken by lightning. "What business could you possibly want to do with me?"

"Not I," he denied, almost plausibly. "I've a friend who needs a village witch badly, and she's too posh to know it."

She frowned down at him. "Money solves all sorts of problems." She remembered that. All too well, some days.

"Not all sorts. Only the simple ones."

"I don't need charity even from you, our Very."

"Bite your tongue, Mam. First, not possible, second, not what I'm come with. But I would be obliged if you'd overcharge her about a thousandfold. Put it all in a Neighborhood Restoration Fund if you want, but she'll give your advice less weight and respect me less if you don't."

"Is that the way of it?"

"I said she was too posh to know she needs a village witch," he reminded her. "Well. She does know, though she wouldn't think to call it that. But she thinks I'm the one she has."

"Aren't you?" she asked, feeling her weathered face, too old for a witch of her age, soften a little as she looked at her boy's clever hands.

He smiled a little, wry, and said, "I do what I can, but I don't know shite about babies, Mam. I made her try the hospital, but they weren't much help in the end."

"Bite your own tongue," she said automatically, her mouth forgetting he was grown and could use what words he liked. He laughed at her a little again, just with his eyes. "And what do you think I can do that you and your fancy mediwizards can't?"

"If I knew, I'd read up and do it myself, wouldn't I?"

She had her doubts about that. It wouldn't be the first time he'd tried to smuggle or lie some coin into her purse. But you couldn't turn them away when they came calling. Not a stranger, not a neighbor, and certainly not family. Not without listening, at least. "What's the trouble, then?"

He sat up, tucking his long legs under him. "She's just delivered, near a week ago. We'll call him Drake for now, so you don't scare all the birds off laughing."

"This is that Black friend of yours," she said flatly. A Good Family, but not a good family.

"Black as was, yes. Her mother was a Ros—"

"The boy's named for a constellation, then."

"…It's not his fault. He's got _grandparents_. Great-grandparents, yet. Not to mention all the highly opinionated ancestral portraits."

"And how many toy dragons so far?"

"Not sure I can count that high, Mam."

She nodded, mouth twitching. Severus looked put-upon and rueful himself. She only hoped he'd managed to get out of the proud parents' earshot, when he'd first heard the poor mite's name, before breaking down and expressing his opinion. "It's the baby having trouble, then, not the mother?"

He nodded. "He's just…" he trailed off, seeming to run out of words. "He's too quiet, Mam. He doesn't even cry, really. Just this thin little wail sometimes, it's… He isn't… I've done a little reading-up, and it's just not right. He ought to be grabbing if you poke his hand and moving towards something to suck, shouldn't he? You shouldn't have to shove it in his mouth and pinch his nose closed till he gets the idea, not every time. And the tests say he isn't deaf at all, but you can set off an Exploding Snap card right next to him and he barely twitches."

She frowned, and agreed, "That's _not_ right. His mam ever pick him up?" She'd seen that sort of thing, or nearly, when a mother was hit too hard with the baby blues to get up, or died and the father blamed the child, or one never got touched for some other reason.

They'd probably had a close call with their own boy, she and Toby had, just from working long hours and feeling awkward and stiff and worrying about dropping him and not knowing anything or having living parents who'd speak to them. Fortunately, one or two of the older women hadn't been too put off by the young and overwhelmed Eileen's 'haughty' reserve to explain to her that it was not, in fact, a good sign when a baby stopped bothering to cry.

"Hardly puts him down," her baby said, with exactly the same kind of _would be smiling gently if men were allowed to do that_ expression his father had given him all the time back before magic, the pub, and the dole had ruined them for each other.

"What did those tests rule out?" He reached into his waistcoat and pulled out an accordion of parchment that had probably been a scroll before he'd folded it up. Well, it had taken her years to get used to folding instead of rolling, what with muggles not having cushioning charms. She only hoped no one noticed him thinking the other way.

It took some reading. When she was done, she folded it back up again. "If it makes you any happier, you can draw up a bill for a consultation fee and I'll sign it," she said, "and if she'll lower herself to come by with him, I'll look him over. But I expect your friend has the right of it, Very. It's you she needs, not a midwife."

"Mam, I told you, I don't know about—"

"I'm not deaf, my lad." He looked grumpy at her, but subsided. "All you need to know about babies is they've got no defenses of their own. The boy's a Black, isn't he? And the father's family won't be any more progressive, knowing that lot."

"No. Worse. More to prove." He was still looking at her questioningly, but held his tongue, waiting for her to get to the point.

She obliged. "Then who's to say what enemies they've laid by, or what they've got hidden below the wine cellar?"

She watched the expressionless, slapped look slam down on his face, his whole body freeze. Slowly, his voice heavy with horror and self-blame, working against the corded rigidity of the long throat that had skipped her generation, he grated, "She miscarried three times. Twice before she even knew she was carrying. It took everything I could think of to get this one through to term. Including a need-awareness enhancer, and she was craving to be outside like mad almost the whole time. The healers say she can't, again. I thought it was just—they're all so inbred, and her mother had trouble, too… their house wards are _in the safe with the—_ oh god…"

Eileen cuffed her son upside the back of his raggedy head with the folded-up parchment, none too gently. "Nitwit," she said fondly. If someone didn't give him an accusation to resent and disagree with, he'd be accusing himself until the end of time.

Vaguely, he told her, "Keep the basket," and apparated away without even standing up. To his friend's house, no doubt.

"I ought to feed it to the chipmunks," she grumbled. He'd left her with not only a gathering-quality basket and all the food in it, but a nearly-new blanket besides. Just as if he'd only done it because he was in a sudden hurry and hadn't meant to from the start. Well, she'd known he was a sneak and a conniver since before he left for school; nothing to be done about it now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter notes** : No, Severus doesn't know what Tom's Horcruxes are. And he hasn't seen them, themselves, proper. But he has seen the box they're kept in and felt the vibes it gives off. Twice. Because Narcissa keeps him up to date and Luke brags.
> 
>  **Parent-blaming** : Eileen is thinking of a real phenomenon, of course (failure to thrive), when she blames not holding Severus enough as a baby for the way he turned out. Babies absolutely need touch. However, if you look at A Key Called Promise: January '73 and do Narcissa's math, you'll find he was born about three weeks early. As has been discussed in comments (here? one of the prequels? somewhere...), a look at preemie syndrome might be interesting. Keep in mind, if you do look, that his mother was a brewer and might well have been able to correct any physical symptoms that manifested, that it's not usual for people to get *all* the symptoms of most mental health conditions, and that three weeks isn't so premature that a parent ought to be freaking out.
> 
>  **V-day** : One could almost suppose a higher power struck down my car so I'd have to post an Eileen chapter right before V-day. Because as well as Valentine's day, it is, for some, a day to fight violence against women and girls . Against all domestic and intimate partner violence, I'd hope. This isn't what the chapter's about, but I'd just like to share the link to [an advocacy hub](http://www.vday.org/home) for anyone who's interested.


	26. Undisclosed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narcissa burns up a line of credit and stomps on it.
> 
> Courteously!

Lord Voldemort cast the exquisitely illuminated vellum aside with a scowl. Yes, it was a most attractive document, and it certainly was useful to know who was beginning to get the idea that Lucius was a Slytherin of Slughorn's type and always open to considering a new investment. However, he was going to have to make the young fool understand that he wanted _results,_ not curlicues and ribbons. There was absolutely no reason for him to have—

Ah. No, there wasn't, was there.

He tapped the missive with his wand. "Reveal your secrets."

And yes, there it was: the tell-tale flicker of a concealing spell. "Show yourself," he commanded.

Like air painted on air, like heat waves, the runes and circles of the spell swam before his eyes. He scanned them intently, and nodded a little to himself. Not the rarest of concealing enchantments, but a useful one. Nearly unbreakable, it would dissolve for no one whose right to it or authority the maker didn't acknowledge.

He therefore touched his wand to it again and recited, "Lord Voldemort, master of the Mark, commands you to yield the message you conceal."

As though an invisible hand had swept it away, the beautiful calligraphy washed off the page. New words appeared on the smooth surface, in a neat and pretty script that was a pleasure to read.

The message itself did not please.

_Dearest friend,_

_On the occasion of our marriage, you granted my husband and myself the great privilege of holding in trust for you some few of your keepsakes, asking only that we keep them safe ourselves, not relying upon the vaults of others. Your trust and regard have given us great pleasure, and we have felt the honor deeply._

_It is with keen regret that I must tell you the household from which I write is no longer the one to which you entrusted your mementos. Although our devoted friendship has never wavered, nor ever shall, we can no longer hold your treasures within our own walls…_

Lord Voldemort squinted at the parchment, because the letters of the next sentence had bled into thin lines etched deeply into the surface. He could just see it, the imprint of an emphatic quill whose ink had been charmed away. A little spellwork showed him that under the serenely looping ink she had first scrawled, **_They're poisoning my baby_** ** _!_**

The Dark Lord did not slump in his chair, or pound his head against its arm. That wasn't the sort of thing he did, or had done even when he was younger and less patient. Instead, he ran over the list of who had been annoying him lately and Made Some Plans For Them.

All right. He couldn't fault her. In fact, she wasn't sworn to him even if he could fault her, although he could and would take the inconvenience out of Lucius's hide. But the mother was behaving properly. As a witch should.

And, happy thought, a prompt and solicitous reply would bind them to him more deeply still. Nonetheless, damn the brat! He had better prove worth the trouble he was causing. The Dark Lord would bring that home to Lucius. Not obviously, no, but very, very clearly.

Because the Malfoy safes, their deepest hoard, were special. Although goblin-built, they were unknown to the greedy, grasping creatures that ran the bank. Their builders hadn't survived its completion, and it had been in their contracts to live on-site the while. That would have been enough, but they were blanketed, too, by layers on layers of protections laid on by generations of wizarding merchants. For them, tricks and cheating were expected moves of the great game, moves no serious businessman would forgo. No enemy, rival, or Ministry raid had ever so much as found them, much less made a dent.

Though small, the innermost Malfoy safes were arguably safer than Gringotts, where goblins held the keys. Nestled into the heart of the manor's household wards, they were safer than anywhere else he could find, and he had looked and looked. There was almost nowhere else in Britain he would dare keep all the houses of his soul together.

And it had to be Britain. The power of running water, of great rivers and oceans, was not something you wanted between you and something that had to come back to you at need, without being called.

No, they had to stay in Britain. If the safest place wouldn't do, the devotion of those who owned the next-safest would make up for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : __Severus is subjected to highly unusual punishment that wouldn't have been quite so exquisitely cruel if it had been inflicted on practically anybody else. I mean, is given some special training he's totally going to need. For his job. Yup. Job training. Totally necessary. 08)
> 
>  **Notes** : It's not that Snape doesn't have it in him to be a pompous and stubborn ass. Especially during PoA, with the Defense curse working on him and Dementors working on his nerves; I consider he was out of his mind for most of the book. But that was... he equates Harry with James, right? Talking like that in front of James would get him _utterly humiliated_. 'Master of this school,' good god. That's _ritualistic_ cringe-worthy pomposity. I just had to assume that either he was so completely off his gourd that the combat pay/mental health compensation for that year should have set him up for life if he'd lived... or there was an actual reason for it. And we know (from the way sectumsempra is healed, Dumbledore's blood on the wall of the sea cave, and possibly the way Peter felt it necessary to chant the words of the ritual to ressurrect Tom) that there are more kinds of magic than they teach in Hogwarts classes... at least the ones Harry's shown us.
> 
> (Yes, I know master can mean professor. It may be cultural bias speaking, but _even knowing that_ the whole thing came across as eyecrossingly self-important if there wasn't a good reason for it.)


	27. Malfoy Manor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus is subjected to highly unusual punishment that wouldn't have been quite so exquisitely cruel if it had been inflicted on practically anybody else.  
> —Er, gets superspecial, totally necessary spy training. For his job. 0:)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : Lucius.
> 
> (is a slag)

"You know, Severus," Narcissa threw down her powder puff in exasperation, "when I was first asked, I thought, I shall have to pretend that this won't be fun! Severus will learn what he has to, the lamb, I thought, and the old dear will never have to learn what a lovely time we'll have had together! But I'm starting to think it may have been a well-chosen punishment after all."

"Yes," Severus agreed, his shoulders hitched up somewhere around his ears. "Because we're going to have a murder-suicide in three… two…"

"Don't be silly, darling," she sighed, shaking her head. "Put your shoulders down."

"Can't. They live there now."

"You have three seconds before I turn you ginger. There, that wasn't hard, was it? You feel better, don't you. Admit it."

"I'm changing back into my own clothes right now."

"You're doing no such thing. But you are going to relax that muscle, right there." She tapped him with one decisive finger between the eyebrows.

"Am I supposed to be concerned about getting wrinkles, Narcissa? Frankly, I don't think I have the kind of face that aging will much disimprove."

"You don't," she agreed without compunction. "You've gone nicely hawkish now, and you used to look like a black and white parrot." He winced, and she patted his shoulder. "I daresay you'll be quite distinguished-looking in…" With a thoughtful little moue, she regarded him, and decided, "eighty years."

"I hate you quite a lot. With not a burning but a freezing passion."

"To match my alabastor complexion? You adore me, darling," she said airily, patting his head, and snatched her hand back with a laugh before he could bite it. "And you are going to practice relaxing that muscle, Severus, every time you remember to, and you're going to remember to as often as possible, do you understand?"

"I honestly don't," he sighed, headachy.

She rolled her eyes expressively at him, and when he continued stupid, said, "It's a tell, Severus. It tells everyone you're bothered."

"Oh!" Startled, he considered this for a moment, then asked, "Does it tell them what kind of bothered? Could be useful."

She thought about it in turn. "Do you know, I'm not sure, darling. Do it again with the rest of your face blank." When he obliged, she decided, "On its own, it makes you look concerned, I think. But I daresay you and Evan can work out the variations at home."

"I suppose so," he conceded. "Can I change now?"

"You may not. Your complexion is difficult enough to work with without all those horrible, dark, desaturated greens getting in the way."

"Er," he said, looking tentative. She lifted her eyebrows at him until he started to squirm, and continued until he blurted, "If-it's-that-complexion-matters…"

"Yes?" she inquired, sweetly dangerous.

"I… um…"

"Yes, Severus?"

"I… oh, look." He started rubbing at his temples. "this is sort of a secret, all right? I don't want you telling even Luke or Reggie." Abruptly interested, she gave him a look of bright invitation so that he sighed, defeated, "You'd better let me use one of your bathrooms."

"You know where all the—"

"I need a bathroom," he said. "With a shower. Or a quite deep sink. I don't want to transfigure one of the normal ones; in this house it might eat me."

Ten minutes after he came back from his wash, she was still yelling at him. By this point he'd devolved into a sort of immobile glaze propped up by an armchair and probably was not hearing, she knew, more than one word in a hundred. She persisted: the point needed to be strongly made.

"Everything all right, dear?" her husband asked warily, poking his head in as though it was the absolute last thing he wanted to do. Severus dived for the sofa in a streak of unrelieved black, without a morsel of subtlety or shame, and buried his entire head under a pillow.

"Oh, Lucius!" she beamed at him. "Did you know that Severus Snape has been deliberately thumbing his nose at every aesthetic principle ever flown, for as long as we've known him?"

Lucius paused, and eyed her cautiously. "There's someone who didn't?"

"Killing everyone," Severus crooned lovingly from under his pillow. "Sssss-lowwwwwww-lyyyyyyyy…"

"I didn't realize how very much on purpose it was," Narcissa said sadly, and kicked her friend viciously in the shin. It only made him say ow in an annoyed tone and curl up like a seahorse. Lucius, whose silvery eyes had darkened as Severus's deep voice crawled all over the octave, took a few interested steps in to look. He rarely did resist the urge to watch anyone walk away. "He cleans up almost nicely," she added, dirgelike, and kicked Severus again, harder.

"Well," Lucius said smoothly, straightening up and removing his eyes with some reluctance. Narcissa mused that Severus must be quite serious about keeping his dreadful topical a secret, to show his back—and to Lucius of all people. "I clearly don't want any part of this when there are, let me see, accounts to balance, or possibly stables to muck out, so unless you're going to make him moan like that again, dear…"

Severus raised not his head but two unaccustomedly pale fingers.

"I take it I can report all's going well?" her husband asked her.

"Not as well as it's about to go," she smiled back at him, and kicked Severus a third time—on the sole of his boot, since by this time he was curled up like a hedgehog that had spent far too long on the rack.

"Delighted to hear it," Lucius said affably. He leaned in to kiss her on the cheek and thumb promisingly down her décolletage before ambling off. She shivered. It was so nice to have Draco outside of her and Lucius not worried about crushing him anymore.

The pillow went down, the wizard came up, and Severus glared at her.

"You offend me philosophically," she informed him.

"I gathered," he continued to glare. "Good god. You know the infant would be in fits by now if there weren't about fifty rooms between you, do you?"

"Yes, it's about time the family learned something about tasteful moderation, isn't it? Clever of them to secure me. Well!" She clapped her hands, blithely ignoring the way he had choked at that comment so close to her outburst. "Now we've got that settled and I can understand Evan so much better—don't whine like that, darling, you're not a puppy."

"Dead puppies aren't much fun," he muttered, with a note of longing that she took to be for the peace of the grave.

"Focus, Severus. Now, listen, darling," she coaxed, moving to sit beside him. "You've been asked to learn these things and you're going to have to, there's simply no getting around it. There's all manner of other things we could start on, walking styles or etiquette and word sets for different types of company or, oh, anything. But then you'd just have to come back another day in your own bare skin, don't you see? Much better to tackle this bit now."

"I know," he said gloomily, "but it's so… so Gildylocks, Narcissa," he finished plaintively, with a demonstrative flourish.

"No, darling," she said sympathetically squeezing his hand. "I wouldn't do that to you, honestly I wouldn't. Well," she amended with a steely glint just to remind him who was boss around here (not that he'd forgotten, but an ounce of prevention and all that), "you'd have to annoy me very much indeed." Her best friend properly cowed, she returned to sympathy. "This isn't about being flashy. Here, I'll show you."

She drew him up and led him to the great grandmother of all vanities. Her great grandmother's, as it happened. Its surface was choked with pots and powders, most older than she was but all still good. Sitting down before it, she selected a little tub of beige powder. A puff went below each cheekbone, at the dip above her chin, and her temples, and she did some strategic dusting around mainly the top of her nose.

With that horrible potion cleaned off of him and no greens to turn his surprisingly seashell-like skin even sallower than it did, his eyes were even darker-looking, but somehow warmer. They widened, intrigued. "You look like the Tartan," he observed, "and your nose!"

"And this is one minute's work with only shadows and no magic, Severus. It's entirely safe from finites and spell and glamour-breakers of all sorts. And it's much more likely you'll run into one of them than it is someone will aim a cleaning charm at your face. If you ever need to walk into Gringotts, for example, or the Ministry..."

"Unless it's your cousin and he already thinks it's me," he noted. "Making me eat soap is, I think, his keenest pleasure in life."

"Well, apply yourself and he won't think it's you. Now, talking of noses," she dimpled, banishing the powder from her face with a touch of her wand, "shall we see what we can do with yours?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I _think_ the Dead Puppies song (credit: Ogden Edsl) had been written by this point. I _doubt_ Severus would have been able to catch Dr. Demento on his wireless. And odds are if he had he would have turned it off in disgust. But if he'd tuned in at something darkish that he had the cultural references for, and been sure of not getting found out by the wrong people... sometimes you have to wade through a mountain of nonsense for that one shining nugget of morbid irony.


	28. #18 Dye Urn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tom takes the logical next step, Severus recovers from Lily-induced trauma by freaking Reggie out, and Gilderoy embarks on a Lucrative and Erudite (or at least quasi-literate) Career of Dashing Adventurousness!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : waff? And some UST. Otherwise the summary about covers it. Did I mention Gildy? Gildy. And some UST. Implied casual pairing-off mostly unrelated to the UST, neither of which is going anywhere. And waff.

"'Working' again?"

"Fuming," Evan answered. "See, you can tell because the table's smoking."

"Oh, so it is," Reg said, squinting. "That can't be good for the finish." Then he yelped, and started blowing on his suddenly frostbitten fingers. Aggrieved, he demanded, "What?"

Severus's eyes on him did an odd sort of refocusing. Reg had seen it before, but it never got less disconcerting, the way he seemed to drag his eyes to your skin from your bones. "Oh, it's you," he said, without emotion.

"And very welcome I feel."

"Don't mind Sturm Und Drang," Evan sympathized with everyone. "He ran into the marmalade sow—"

"Don't call her that."

"—at the hospital and apparently," Evan Hogwarts-Expressed over Severus, looking as disgusted as his congenitally placid face could manage, "she gave him one of those Oh Sorrow The Loss If Only You'd Reasonably Agreed To Be A Completely Different Person Like A Good Friend Would Have, You Waste Of Skin looks. He's been like this all evening."

"Looks like chupacabra bait," Spike muttered viciously. " _Dango_ skewer."

"You didn't say that when Narcissa was farther along than she is," Evan pointed out, his own version of viciousness giving way to amusement. "And, very, _very_ quietly between the three of us, between the threads, Cissy looked like an ivory quaffle on a stick."

"You were painting her, so you _both_ would have killed me," Severus explained. He didn't sound particularly interested, but not even the lack of emphasis would make them believe he thought either witch anything but beautiful.

Reg had never really felt he had a handle on the Spike/Evans-bitch situation. He'd had enough trouble in his life at school, between Sirius and handling his roommates, without nosing into subjects that made Spike deflate, Narcissa's lip curl, and Evan's eyes ice over. Tentatively, he asked, "But, er, _you_ didn't want to—" He broke off when Spike gave him an appalled look. There was rather a lot of nose to wrinkle.

"Guinevere," Ev said with dark humor, "she of the white hands, is not supposed to get up the duff."

"Guinevere," Spike countered, annoyed, " _was_ supposed to give birth, and half the trouble was that she never could. Possibly all of the trouble. You never know; maybe Lancelot could have kept his tongue in his mouth if she'd had a normal dowager's figure. And it was Isolde with the white hands. Ysuelt. Some such spelling. But if we follow your truly dismal and ill-fitting metaphor—"

"Really absolutely all evening," Evan told Reg, long-suffering. Reg sympathized. Five minutes was, in proximity to a Sodding Snape Mood™ a long time to suffer.

"—then we would say that Guinevere was not supposed to have her fields sown by Melwas, Morgana, Lamorak, or, god forbid, Mordred."

"…How would Morgana have…?"

"Magic. Obviously."

"Ah. Magic that exists?"

"Sex-change, maybe? As one does?"

"Could they make that potion back then?

"The hell should I know?"

"Well, let's face it, O Obstetrician-Amateur—"

"Amateurs dabble because they _like_ to. Not because their friends are badgering crocodiles. _Amator, amatorem—_ "

"Let's face, it, I said: if anyone here is going to know about that sort of—"

"Then allow me to rephrase. The hell do I care?" He paused. And then said, unwillingly, "No, they couldn't, because you need Amborella carpels and stamens, and they didn't even know about Melanesia and Grand Terre, let alone have access _oh shut up._ "

"I expect Bella would tie Evans to a burning stake if you wanted," Reg horned in with (ha) black humor over Evan's laughter. "She'd find it very encouraging of you."

"Your cousin's understanding of the fine and subtle art of retributive justice is both limited and crude," Severus said, moody but without rancor. Well, he was getting rather thoroughly snugged. "She mistakes strength for effect. What earthly use is killing someone?"

Reg and Evan looked at each other over his shoulder. Evan suggested, amused, "They're dead?"

"Yes, well," Spike said, still moodily, "all right for getting someone out of your _way,_ granted. But if they're dead, unless you can see beyond the veil, how can you know they're suffering, or have understood enough to learn regret?"

" _Is_ she suffering?" Reg asked, curious.

"She will be," Spike said darkly. "She's got to _live_ with the lying bastard, and sooner or later she'll realize what she's got. And then," with a charcoaled chuckle that seemed to come not so much from his throat as the pit of hell, "he'll find out one or two things about who _she_ is, when she thinks you've Let Her Down.

"Also," he added, less darkly but with a dreamy note of deeply disturbing contemplation, "Narcissa screamed a _lot_ and broke Luke's hand. And Narcissa's a quite restrained person with no manebrained nonsense about natural births or being strong equating to inviting pain. So there's that."

"Are you, er, contributing to her suffering in any way?" Reg asked cautiously.

"I have a pensieve," he was told, with an even more disturbing little smile. "He will keep on stalking me. Playing his little tricks. And she thinks she has him," his lips curled, "thoroughly reformed. If she takes _too_ long to suss him on her own…" he made an fluting little what-can-one-do gesture with one hand.

"My pensieve is much nicer," Evan reflected dreamily, eyes off somewhere in the middle distance, somehow managing to turn his sprawl horrifyingly lewd without moving any noticeable muscles. "You should see it, Reggie, it's really something."

"I will slaughter you with seashells and lay out your bones for the birds," Severus informed his partner without the least change in tone or expression. But the air suddenly felt about three hundred percent cleaner.

"I'm fine!" Regulus said hastily. He could guess more than he needed to know about the memories Evan was keeping. "I do not need to see _anything!_ "

"Better face the wall, then," Evan said. There was a world of amused warmth in his voice, so Reg spun like a top and plastered his hands over his ears.

He'd only gotten through six verses of The Necromancer's Daughter And The Thing With All The Eyes before something bounced lightly off the back of his head and he turned around cautiously.

They were tangled together on the couch again, but no one had lost any clothes and Spike looked a great deal less likely to set things on fire with his eyes. "Did you come by," he asked, with more usual curiosity, "or come for a purpose?"

"I came by," Reg said. Since there hadn't been any impatience to the question, he dropped into his usual chair and banished his boots to the doorway. "I do have a message from Kreacher about your gingerbread scones, if I need an excuse, but it's a bit profane."

"Does it include any suggestions for improvement that sound worthwhile?"

"Nothing like." He thought about it. "Nothing _remotely_ like."

"Pass, then. Not your usual hour," Severus noted, his thumb moving idly on Evan's collar. "Aren't you usually with your cousins around now?"

"I'm not complaining," Reg said, tucking his toes under his shins. "Bast said Bella was given some big honor and she and Rus were going off to celebrate somewhere."

"How insufferable is she going to be?" Spike asked, curiosity going morbid.

"Bella is never insufferable," Reg said dutifully, but answered, "but he said she was being _trusted_ with something, so I expect she's very pleased and happy."

"He means 'deeply to the umpteenth power'" Evan told Spike helpfully, and was thanked with a gravity spoiled only by the eye-roll. Then, with a judicious air, Severus bit him contemplatively behind the ear. "I seem to have acquired a vampire," Evan observed in a thoughtful voice. As though to oblige him, Spike's cheeks hollowed. They were already on the hollow side ordinarily, so it was dramatic.

"You said I could turn around," whined Reg.

"No," Severus enunciated, patiently and with some difficulty, wrapped around his flatmate like an emaciated vampiric sloth, "' _E_ frew a sssugar kyoob ack hyou. I didn't hshay engy'hing."

Reg looked at him for a while, and then hypothesized to Evan, "So he's just off his rocker tonight and I shouldn't hope for any sort of sense whatsoever."

Removing his teeth but not detaching otherwise, Severus asked curiously from behind Evan's ear, "Did you want some? A little nonsense now and then, as it's said, is relished by the wisest men." Then he sat bolt upright with an expression of horror and exclaimed, "Oh, no, I just described sodding _Dumbledore,_ didn't I."

"Please don't describe sodding Dumbledore," Evan managed in a trembling voice before completely dissolving into laughter at the exponential intensification of Spike's horror, and his yowled, _I didn't mean it as a VERB, you foul-minded git!_

"I don't think I've seen you two this punch-drunk since you took your last NEWTs," Reg observed, eyeing them with alarm while Spike vehemently disarranged Evan's hair with a pillow. When they eventually remembered he was there, he repeated himself.

"Oh, I see," Spike said cheerfully, giving Evan's face (now tucked up against his neck, as if Spike weren't a lunatic masochist and this were a good hiding place) one final _wham_ with the pillow before setting it aside, "you came to spy for Bellatrix."

"No, I didn't," he said, startled. Thinking about it, though, he conceded, "But I daresay she'd be pleased if I came back as though I had done."

"Severus," Evan said dolefully, sliding despairingly down into Severus's lap and covering his much-abused face with long, paint-stained hands. They did nothing to conceal the vivid mark on his neck that Reg was _absolutely not looking at_. "Regulus. Children. Darlings. _It doesn't work if you do it out loud_."

Evan was a few months younger than Severus, Reg thought resentfully, and less than six months older than Regulus.

Reg's mother had not enjoyed pregnancy, and had wanted to be done with her heir-bearing duties as quickly as possible. If Sirius had been born a little earlier, they might all have been in the same year together at school—which wasn't a coincidence. Grandmother had known her health was failing, and that Grandfather wasn't the nagging-people type. She'd gone on something of a Give Me Grandchildren Before I Die rampage.

Narcissa's mum had confided to Reggie that she'd been more than happy to try for a male heir again, and his own mother had gone haughtily dutiful about it. Evan's parents had sort of drifted around the Continent avoiding Grandmother for a few months. They hadn't seemed to process the notion that short people and life disruptions might really happen to them until she'd cornered them in Prague and hit them over the head with a nanny-elf (and possibly an imperius). They must have adjusted once he was born, though. He'd never been close to them, but they always seemed to be pleased to see each other. Reg couldn't imagine either part of that.

"Regulus and I understand one another," Severus said, still cheerful.

"Maybe _you_ do," Reg muttered, not particularly quietly. Then a muscle under his eye twitched involuntarily, because an angelic Narcissa-smile on that blade of a face just _did not work._

"I could bribe you to leave with information," Spike suggested, all demonically-glowing helpfulness.

"You could make him leave without saying one word to him," Evan pointed out, still from under despairing hands.

"Yeeesss," Severus drew out, with the same contemplative do-I-have-room-for-pudding look at Evan's hands he'd given his neck before biting it. "But that would make the kitten cry, Ev. I think, on balance, I'd rather make Saw-scales scream."

Reg drew in a quick, quiet, comprehending breath and saw Spike smile, saw Spike watch him understand out of the corner of an eye. So: there was still something for Bella to be jealous about. Despite whatever had stirred their Lord into a flurry of new plans, whatever he was doing with Severus was still on.

"Pardon me," Evan said in an injured voice, making a window of his fingers to look through, "Why this consideration for Bella when I'm right here?"

"I suppose I should go," Reg said carefully, his eyes locking with Spike's. "You two do seem a bit, er, tired."

"It's been a quite long week," Severus said with a little shrug, not looking away. "No matter what happens, the work goes on."

"Good to be able to count on that, I suppose," Reg suggested.

"Nice to be appreciated," Severus allowed, "even without anything definite to come of it."

From his lap, Evan grumbled something rebelliously pouty that used several of those words.

Reg felt himself turn a bit pink, and slid his boots back on, tapping them closed with his wand. "Well, I suppose I'll just be, er, going," he said, getting up.

"Mm," Spike said, giving Reg a look that would have appeared inscrutable to someone who hadn't known him so long. Reg, however, could see quite well that it was a perfect balance between laughing at him and a smug, anticipating purr. " _Suppose_ you do that."

Regulus turned in the door to say goodnight, but he saw Severus's dark head bending down again. Black hair pooling on Evan's chest, Evan's hands rising rose-gold against it.

 _Hufflepuff_ , he thought wistfully, and tried hard not to think about Evan's pensieve. Tried not to wonder what memories Severus was so hot to protect.

An embarrassingly short time later, the door Regulus was knocking on opened. The loveliest eyes he quite often never wanted to see again were blinked at him. He tacked a warm smile onto his little wave hello, and meant it.

"Reggie!" the wizard exclaimed buoyantly. As ever, he sounded as though he was rolling every word over in his mouth to catch its honeyed flavor, and finding each one good. "Well! This _is_ a surprise. Couldn't go another day without me, eh?"

"How did you know?" Reg asked, with a look of admiration. Of course, his deranged classmate would have filled in the admiration for himself if it hadn't been forthcoming in objective-reality-land. Just as well in these matters to give what was wanted, though, when it cost Regulus nothing. "I've missed you _awfully,_ Gilderoy. You wouldn't be free to come and have a drink with me, would you? We could catch up."

" _Well,_ " Lockhart deliberated, tapping his mouth, yes, deliberately, the rake and catch of his eyes giving his moue of hesitation the lie.

Regulus was actually quite pleased about this piece of absurdity. If there was one thing you could rely on Gildylocks for, it was an accurate assessment of how fit you were. Of course, he cared so much more about being appreciated himself that Reg had always vaguely felt he shouldn't be allowed around house elves.

But he was something of an expert. Reg had been feeling worn down and washed out lately, as if his soul needed to be not only washed but darned, bleached, starched, ironed, infused with black coffee, and bleached again. The appreciation of someone whose expertise encompassed every beautifying charm in the library (even if it stopped there) was enormously welcome.

"I don't know, Reggie," Gildy went on, cheerily and gracefully arch. "I _had_ planned on a quiet evening in. I'm writing a book, you know."

"Are you!" Reg exclaimed. "No, are you really? How clever of you! You'll have to tell me all about it, Gilderoy. Maybe I could give it a look-over for old times' sake. You know," he said, reaching out to brush the back of Lockhart's well-wrought, well-manicured, and beautifully moisturized hand lightly, "your spelling never _was_ as good as your smile. But then it would have a hard time of that, wouldn't it?"

"Reggie, you're just too generous," Gilderoy declared. He favored Reg with a playful thump on the chest that trailed off just a little too slowly, as well as the aforementioned white grin.

Regulus had to admit it was a pretty grin. Unfailingly enthusiastic, with long, full, mobile lips. No one else he'd ever seen had teeth so regular. Not even Narcissa or Sirius, who had been born like that. Not just obviously spelled (and obviously pathological) but a bit odd-looking. Not in a bad way, though. Exotic, almost, when one was in the mood to see it that way, or just wanted to stop wondering how more crooked teeth would bite and scrape.

"Never stinting of his time, that's old Regulus. Always ready to help a friend. And, do you know, about that drink, I think I _might just_ have a very nice bottle of…"

Regulus let himself be drawn inside, let the burbling, and later the burbler, pour over him. Maybe he didn't have a partner and a match, like all his cousins did. No reason to sulk about it through a perfectly good night off. There were still simple things in the world, free and easy and (o soul's balm) no harm to anyone, his for the asking.

Not quite free, actually, but Reg didn't mind. Gildy's spelling was still awful, but his book was shaping up to be better-written than Reg would have expected from his school essays. And, when you knew him, it was _hilarious._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Credit** to Roald Dahl for the Willy Wonka tribute. Which is a book that Severus has absolutely read, because his father MADE him. May have even read to him soon after it came out ('64). It was a book about a _factory_ , and it wasn't expliiiiiiiicitly about magical stuff, and candy is sort like potions, right? And there's a candy-making factory in their town (still running, I think, or at least was at the time of the books) that Severus could totally have grown up to work for... anyway, nice try at world-bridging, Toby, and I mean that sincerely.


	29. Savorin & Baske's, Diagon Alley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Severus's turn to be freaked out, karma courtesy of the Black sisters. For once, Bella isn't doing it on purpose. She's just in over her head, but no one else has noticed. If she's very, very lucky, he won't mortally offend all his allies before he can explain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : enough body language to make anybody's eyes cross.

"What the _hell_ is the matter with your sister?!" Severus hissed, stepping over the café's velvet rope to join them at their table, under the spread of a lacy white parasol that suited only one of the three of them. Narcissa raised a chilly eyebrow. Irritably, he clarified, "No, I mean _today_."

"Set business first, Spike, then new business," Evan said, reaching out to pull him down by the wrist. Skin contact sometimes helped settle him. Which was just as well, because he was awfully chary about potion dependence for someone working towards his mastery. "Sit and have some tea before _ab_ solutely everyone notices you bristling."

"I'm not bristling," Spike protested (he was wrong), but he let himself be drawn next to Evan. In fact, he let himself be drawn so close that, since it was him and they were in public, Ev was inclined to interpret it as spooked huddling.

"Your shoulders are up by your ears, darling," Narcissa pointed out with sympathetic firmness, "and your scalp is so prickly your hair almost looks like it has some body for once. I'd recommend you keep it up, but it must be so hard on your nerves."

Spike glared at her while Evan tried to bury his snort in his napkin. He didn't quite make it in time, so the glare turned, betrayed, to him. As sympathetic as his cousin but amused where she was stern, he slipped a soothing hand around the back of his partner's neck and said, "Tell me what's wrong with the tea."

As far as he could tell, there was nothing wrong with the tea.

"Unsubtle," Severus sulked, but he finally accepted a cup and breathed in the steam before rolling a sip around in his mouth. "Water didn't boil," he mused, "the leaves were fresh… didn't steep too long… porcelain pot, fine… ah. Too mature when picked."

"Freak," Evan observed, and kissed him on the palm. Spike grinned at him, just with his eyes. So Evan kissed him again, and lowered their hands without letting go.

"You two are revolting," Narcissa smiled. "No _dignity,_ darlings."

"Overrated," Evan said airily, and Spike snorted disbelief at him.

With a noncommittal hum, Narcissa said briskly, "Now, unless Bella's hurt…"

"No. But she's acting _extremely_ strangely, and Rus agrees with me."

"Is he terribly upset?"

With an expression both ironic and disturbed, Spike murmured, "'Upset' isn't the word I would have chosen. Unless you're asking how I felt after watching him ogle."

"Then it'll keep. Pick a target, lamb."

"Order something first," Evan said, because he had to sleep on those bones. Between days at the lab and evenings with their Lord (which seemed to be going well enough, but were unrelenting), Spike had been living almost exclusively on eggs, fruit, and sandwiches for the last week or so. Evan had started resorting to take-away and bothering his mother's elf. "We'll be here a while, and we don't want the waiter bustling around trying to make us free up the table."

"Then we should wait till he starts to bustle before ordering anything," Severus said practically. Evan couldn't argue with that. Severus scanned the street, and shrugged. "You choose."

Narcissa started to protest, but Evan lifted a hand. "Who most caught your eye?"

"Them," Severus said instantly, pointing to a ginger couple with a pram.

"Why?"

"Well, I suppose it's natural I'm noticing infants more," he said slowly. "Having been thrown up on twice this week."

" _Spat_ up on, and you had a shoulder-cloth and a wand; don't whine. And how many other babies are there out today?" Narcissa asked archly.

"Five in view," Spike said, after only a moment's thought.

"Freak," Evan repeated, hiding a smile and squeezing his hand.

"Predated," Spike said darkly, but he squeezed back.

"If that's a word it means preceded. _You_ mean preyed-on."

Expecting a cross _I was_ _ **not**_ _,_ Evan clenched up all over when Severus went white-eyed and tight-throated, just like he'd used to all through their sixth year. He'd thought they were done with that, but Severus's hand in his was cold, suddenly shaky.

"It wasn't just the baby, then, Severus," Narcissa said, a bit loudly, her eyes worried on their friend, "so what else?"

He turned to her slowly, as though his neck was rusted almost solid. Evan half expected to hear a squeal. Their fingers were grinding painfully together, they were both clutching so hard. Severus pushed out, almost without volume, "What?"

She repeated the question, this time doing a perfect job of sounding like nothing had happened. Severus's hand relaxed slightly in Evan's, but he didn't object when Evan, all casual geniality, scooted his chair closer and let go to wrap an arm around the wiry chainmail tension of his shoulders.

"Well," he said, slow again, leaning minutely into Evan, "they're standing still, and most people are moving. And they are awfully bright. I mean her robes, not just the hair."

"You're good at ignoring Lockhart," Evan pointed out.

"Lockhart's all bounce and no purpose—oh." He looked again. "They're waiting for something."

"Such as?"

"How should I know?"

"Excellent question, darling," Narcissa dimpled with just a hint of exasperation. "How _should_ you know?"

"Do you know?" he asked curiously. His hand crept around Evan's back. At this display, made in public, Evan nearly cried.

He and Narcissa had tried everything they could think of to find out what had happened to him the April before their OWLs, up to and including their best efforts at manipulating Slughorn. They had the sinking feeling that asking Reg to snoop had been part of the munitions pile that had blown up his home and left him with almost more on his shoulders than he could bear. Reg said not, but he would never have said anything else. All that, and they still didn't know what had happened to skin their cobra scaleless.

"I'm not going to try to find out until you do," Narcissa said firmly. "Neither is Evan. Go on, darling."

"You're an iniquitous, teasing wench," Spike said, his voice sniffy but with an affectionate quirk at the corner of his mouth. When Narcissa looked pleased, the quirk turned into nearly an eighth of a smile and he turned back to look at the little family. He frowned, still leaning into Evan, and said, "They're outside the bookshop, but they're looking at the broom shop. Anxious, but not actively worried. Ev, how old would you say they are?"

"Not I, Naj."

Spike made a _hmph_ noise, and narrowed his eyes. "Am I allowed omnioculars?"

"What do you think?"

"Too conspicuous," he conceded, and improved his vision by casting, " _Acue oculis_."

"Indicators and interpretations," Evan told him.

"All right… I said anxious because their gaze is fixed on the broom shop, but it's not so fixed that I'd call them frightened. Their posture is reasonably relaxed, but attentive. And, yes, there's that glabellar contraction you mentioned, Narcissa."

"Are you practicing?" she asked sweetly.

Spike looked guiltily at her, and then his forehead smoothed out. He blinked surprise, saying, "That's mood-affecting."*

"Good. Keep at it. Go on," she nodded at the couple.

"Well… the contraction's deep on the woman, as though the muscles are well-developed, but it hasn't turned to a permanent crease yet. And she does have definite smile lines; I'd put her at ten or fifteen years older than us. Er… closer to ten."

"Why?"

"I wouldn't put money on it," he said, "but her husband only looks five or ten years older than we are—"

" _Are_ they married?" Evan asked. "Could be relatives, with the matching hair."

"No: matching rings, too. And I had the idea that reproducing-marriages were most usually of an age or with a younger witch?" He looked at Narcissa questioningly.

" _Naja siamensis_ ," she told him severely, "that is one of the ugliest, most tactless phrases I have ever heard, and I've known you for nearly ten years."

"Oh, Merlin, don't say that," Evan winced. "I'm too young to feel old, coz."

"I might have said 'breeding-couples,'" Severus pointed out with a smirk, not in the least put out at being reminded why they'd called him the _spitting_ cobra. She shuddered delicately, and retreated behind her teacup. "Well?"

"More common, not de rigueur," she said shortly. "My father's the younger. So is Reggie's."

"What else?" Evan asked, pulling them gently back on track. "Are they purebloods?"

"Yes," Severus answered at once, although he didn't stop sneaking wary little glances at Narcissa and her tight mouth. "They're completely at home in the Alley, and he doesn't have trouser-cuffs below his robes."

"Independent means?"

"No. Not now, anyway. The clothes fit perfectly, and there are seams to say that's through tailoring, not transfiguration—or at least it was when they bought them. But they've seen a deal of wear."

"Source of income, then?"

This question was met with a long silence. Finally, Spike told Evan, "Blowed if I know." This, sadly, was his version of civilizing his language for mixed company, not a suggestion about what his reward for getting it right ought to be. Evan would have given him a pained look if Narcissa hadn't already been radiating frost. "They're not hand-workers like we are. I think the witch stays—oh, it's multiple children," he realized. "Those robes have taken regular stains and cleaning spells for longer than a few months; they're getting threadbare and not just at the joint areas. She's been at home for some time. The man could be office, could be a wand-centric job."

"He works at the Ministry," Evan told him.

"You know him?"

"Don't have to," Evan said. This was true, although he had often seen the fellow bustling about in the halls. "Look how dull and respectable he is."

"He's bouncing on his feet a bit," Severus said critically.

"Evan means the robes," Narcissa said coldly. Evidently Spike was not forgiven yet. "What's the connection he made?"

"I said I don't know," he said, matching her curt tone, his shoulders hardening.

Ev shot her a warning look and took over again, his hand slow on his friend's back. "Put it this way, Spike," he said. "Is he dressed look-at-me or camouflage?"

" _She's_ dressed look-at-me," he said, not relaxing. "Is that really camouflage?"

"It's don't-bother-to-notice-me," Evan said. "We'll work on tailoring tells later. But what I saw is that he's dressed like someone who has to maintain an unexceptionable reputation, not like someone who's trying to sell himself."

"Like you?"

"Mum does think we get more clients by inviting the eyes, yes."

"Wear what you like, then." Spike paused, then asked curiously, "How do I dress?"

Evan couldn't keep his smile down, and not just because of the compliment. He looked at Spike's slate-blue waistcoat, his shirtsleeves the color of shadows on bare wood, his long, long cuffs that had never been a fashion, ever, the fountain pen clipped to the left sleeve-garter.

"Like someone who likes to disappear, but doesn't give a damn who thinks what when he's willing to be seen," he said, and hooked a high-booted leg with his ankle.

By the time they broke eye contact, Severus was a bit flushed. He never did know what to do when he felt seen, especially in public. It had probably been very wrong of Evan to keep it up until he cracked. But Spike really ought to get it through his head at some point that he hated the people he hated for very good reasons, and their opinions about him weren't worth listening to. So actually Evan had been doing him a favor and not torturing him via self-indulgence at all. Or, better yet, he'd been _both_ torturing Spike for Narcissa _and_ doing him a favor, because pain builds character! There it was: the perfect spin.

The couple and their baby were bustling towards the broom shop. They now had a four-or-five year old boy in tow, and another about the right size for Hogwarts, but carrying a parcel too small to be his set-books .

Narcissa had probably decided to take her revenge by confronting Severus with more food than he usually ate in a week and watching him twitch over conspicuous consumption and waste, because the waiter was moving back into the café proper and she was smiling at them with innocent evil. Spike's shoulders settled at her expression, tensing in an entirely different way at the same time.

Pleased at being properly terrifying, she said chattily, "That should give you a sense for the sorts of questions to ask yourself when you're practicing, Severus. Let's look at walking-posture until the food gets here, shall we? And then you can tell us about Bella. Twillfit and Tatting's after we eat, I think, for a practical course in clothing tells, and then back to the Manor so you can practice walking styles without a public audience. I'm sure one of the elves can find that special Slippery Head Book from my summer finishing school."

Severus groaned softly, but didn't protest.

They talked weight-distribution, arm-swing, hand-tension, and head position until the waiter came back. His tray wasn't filled to the point of needing magical expansion, as Evan had expected, but was loaded up with the sort of coma-inducing comfort food that might have come off a Hogwarts table.

Narcissa looked as though she wasn't sure whether to be disappointed, or appalled at the implications, or to laugh when Spike zoomed at the roast, sparking parsnips, and boomberry-horseradish sauce almost before the waiter had put them down, exclaiming, "Wait, I recognize that; that's food!"

"Evan," Narcissa uttered, the word encompassing a world of horrified question.

"We've been on eggs, cold food, and take-away for weeks," he said, resigned to it.

"I'm _busy,_ " Spike retorted, nabbing a square of pud with a singleminded intensity Evan was almost hurt to have to share with food. "You could learn."

"Could I? I should try again?" There was a pause and shudder next to him. "I rest my case."

Evan and Narcissa talked about Evan's clients until Severus had slowed down, on the premise that it was the topic he was least likely to have anything to add to. Narcissa was evidently still a bit miffed at Spike over that breeding-couples remark, because she kept cooing questions at him about the Tunisian ambassador's cousin. And she knew perfectly well the woman kept hitting on Evan even though the portrait she was sitting for was going to be a present for her husband.

Fortunately for her, Spike also already knew about this, and was rather inclined to be amused. At Evan's expense, too, although sympathetically enough, for him. She might have picked a different needle to poke Severus with if she'd known about the ambassador's cousin's gingivitis. But you didn't tell Narcissa about things like that. Not about other witches of her own class, not if they were reasonably pretty. Unkind.

Severus rejoined the conversation much sooner than Evan was pleased about, having stopped attacking his roast and started picking fitfully at the parsnips after only a few bites. It was perhaps easier for him than for some for his eyes to be larger than his stomach, Evan mused, trying to be fair. His eyes were definitely the best features of his face, visually speaking, although his cheekbones weren't far behind in the running when his hair was up and one could _see_ them. And he had strong, speaking eyebrows, although one could perhaps consider those part of the eyes, in a way. Not-visually speaking there was a great deal to be said for his mouth, and when Ev had taken that Amborella potion he became a great deal fonder of Spike's nose than was normally the case.

But one really had to be horribly biased or not paying attention not to at least notice that his eyes were absolutely unlike anyone else's. They weren't small naturally, and since he wore his hair down in curtains to hide behind most of the time and his face was so thin in the first place anyway, they really looked enormous (that was probably half the problem with his nose, too. If he'd put on fifty pounds and could somehow manage to give his hair some body it wouldn't look half so large. Oh, well).

They weren't the most common shape in the world, either—of course, Evan was more sensitized to these things than most, as a painter, and he was willing to admit his bias. He was even willing to admit he might be romanticizing a bit when he called them (only in the safety of his own head, because anywhere else even (or maybe especially) Spike would laugh at him) perfect half-moons. Still, he thought he would be safe enough in asserting, even out loud, that they were a nice shape.

And then there was the black. When Evan had seen people with eyes that dark in, say, Madrid, or Constantinople, he hadn't given it a second thought. When one saw black eyes in Britain, though, even paired with black hair and a skin tone Spike's soap made sallow enough to suggest some Eastern European blood, it just did not look normal. The question that came to mind wasn't, 'what language should I try saying hello in first,' it was 'is this man terrified or about to rip my trousers off?'

One could almost understand Sirius, really, if one were inclined to. Someone turning those eyes on him, with a neutral, solemn, attentive face like Spike always had at first, with all the intensity Spike gave to whatever he was looking at, especially when he didn't know what it was yet. Then that grave, attentive person who'd been giving him that undivided, blown-eyed attention turning Spike's _tongue_ on him when Siri was loud and bouncy and posh at him, trying to impress him, stir him up, heat him up, nervous-excited-arrogant like Siri would have been on the train that first day… Sirius wouldn't have known, at eleven, why it felt like a betrayal, but it still would have felt to him like a sucker-punch and the rug pulled out from under him.

But Severan eyes, turned on Evan, were never a lie.

Ev thought very hard about Bludgers and naked Avery for a moment. Stilton. Stilton that had been left in the cupboard and gone sweaty and even smellier. Old muggles without teeth gumming at it anyway and talking with their mouths open. Whew.

He took his own turn to make some inroads on his lunch while Spike grilled Narcissa on how the baby was doing, now that some Dark artifact had been taken away from where they had been influencing the house protections.

Since the short form of the answer appeared to be _just fine although rather leaky_ , Evan said, "Speaking of relatives."

"What _do_ you think is wrong with Bella?" Narcissa asked, frowning a little as she lifted a spoonful of firecrab soup.

Spike put his fork down and stared through the teapot. "You know," he said, "I've had that question in the back of my mind for the last two hours, and I _still_ don't know quite how to describe how she struck me."

"Yes, you do," Evan contradicted fondly, because he knew that reluctant tone. "Out with it, Spike. Narcissa knows you _wanted_ to be diplomatic."

But Severus shook his head. "I really don't, Ev. That is…" he hesitated. "All right, I can do it like that," he decided, nodding at where the ginger couple had stood. "You'll have to draw your own conclusions; I'm stumped. I'd say draw them after seeing her for yourselves, but actually I'd avoid her even if I were you, Narcissa."

A fleeting look of worry shadowed Narcissa's face before she smoothed it away. "Are you overreacting, Severus? Because you do sometimes, you know. One might go so far as to say often. Or even usually. Constantly might be stretching it, but not too terribly far, darling."

"I hope I am," Spike said. "You know her better, of course."

Narcissa smiled wanly at Evan, and said with false frivolity, "Severus Snape admitting someone else might know better; now I am worried!"

"Don't make me give you the expertise-assessment-via-peer-review-piranha-tank lecture," Spike threatened.

Narcissa started to ask what that was. Evan plastered an urgent, urgent hand over her lovely mouth, shaking his head vehemently with wide, warning eyes. Her eyes widened, too, and she made a graceful all-right gesture.

Evan removed his hand carefully, and said, "Go on, then."

Spike nodded, and said, "She isn't using her hips like she usually does, or aiming her chest at people."

"Oh, Severus, she does not!" Narcissa protested.

"Oh, yes she does," the wizards chorused. "It's not overdone," Evan added, "perfectly tasteful, but she _absolutely_ does it. Baby-bird hypnotism. Leads with her breasts and lips, walks with a sway, keeps her eyes half-lidded and looks at people from under her lashes…"

"She's still doing _that,_ " Severus put in, "but it's… I don't know, it's different. And she's holding her hands, er…" he trailed off again, frowning. He made a few experimental, curling gestures in the air and moved his hand and arm about. "The focus is changed," he decided. "And the flexibility. Look, here's how the two of you normally move," he said to Narcissa, and made a very graceful, feminine swishing gesture. Evan recognized the wand-work for a sinking spell, done open-handed, and not just because the slice of lemon in Narcissa's water glass dropped to the bottom.

"Wrist very loose," Spike catalogued, "but well controlled, base knuckle stiff, middle knuckle the driving force of most movements, top knuckle more or less irrelevant; the top bone neither leads nor fights gestures."

Narcissa examined her hands curiously.

"What's she doing now?" Evan asked.

"Leading with her fingertips," Severus said. He thought about it and elaborated, "The pads of the fingertips, not the nails. Everything stiff like supple wood, not jerky. Steady tension all the time."

"Show me." Spike made a curling motion, and something unpleasant started curling in Evan's stomach. He didn't think it was the fire-crab. "Reach for my arm." Spike did, and it didn't help. Starting to feel jittery, he said, "What do you mean about her eyes?"

"Well, you know how she usually looks at me…"

"Let's see it on your face, so we can compare," Narcissa said.

Severus looked from one of them to the other, and then wisely aimed his face at the teapot. He gave it such a heavy-lidded look of icy-hot, savouring, aggressively sensual detestation that its ever-warm charm failed and ice crept up its sides.

"All right," Narcissa admitted, "that's Bella. Stop it at once, Severus, her face on your face looks like Rasputin."

" _Ha!_ The one person on earth whose nose dwarfed mine!"

"Or a satyr."

"Close: Capricorn."

"You're not helping your case, darling— _Stop grinning like that!_ "

"You've got to be able to make the faces without the feeling, Spike," Evan said, covering Severus's hand to bring them back on task. What had crept up his insides was nothing like ice, but he kept his focus. Because _he_ could do that. "It takes you too long to come down when no one distracts you, and things like that happen." He gestured at the poor, broken teapot.

"Well, anyway," Spike shrugged, fixing it with a tap of his wand.

"All right," Evan agreed, but in a we're-not-done-with-this tone. "And how's she looking at you now?

Severus turned to him, and suddenly Evan felt like an ant. An ant whose leash the cobra was holding. Which probably had a lightning-spell on it, to be activated the moment Evan made one wrong move. Maybe even a spell that would unlimb him. But he didn't _want_ to make a wrong move, didn't want to disappoint the cobra, and he knew the cobra understood how much he wanted to please. The cobra was coolly pleased that all and Evan were as they should be, and Evan was so grateful he could hardly breathe…

His voice strangled, he said, "Hold that," and reached to turn his partner's face and gaze back to the teapot. Shaking, he said, "Coz, tell me when I have his expression matched."

When her small voice said _there_ , he turned to Severus, saying, "You can drop it now. Pay attention. Who is this?"

Without changing his expression, he reached for Severus's face, careful to hold his hands in that stiff-supple way that had just been described. He let his fingers wash up the long throat, cup the narrow face. Severus had told him about that. He'd nearly had a fit.

He would have even if it hadn't been Spike. One couldn't say it aloud about one's father's schoolfriends, of course, especially after agreeing to be in their stupid mugglephobic secret societies (well, he'd _had_ to; Dad would only have pretended not to have been crushed. Besides, half his own schoolmates would never have gotten off his and Spike's backs about it ever, to say nothing of Bella), but the 'Dark Lord' was really _exceptionally creepy_ sometimes.

Severus whispered, "Oh, Christ. You're right."

The three of them looked at each other for a long, long time, just breathing carefully and sipping their tea to keep the world from reading what was beneath their pale but placid, unconcerned faces.

Eventually, Severus ventured, "Do you think he knows?"

Narcissa closed her eyes. She might have been praying. "He _can't_ ," she said, faint but fierce. "If he does… no," she said decisively, her face's natural, delicate color coming back. "She started being smug and talking about how much he trusts her right after I told him we couldn't house his wretched keepsakes with a baby in the manor. And he didn't know what effect they'd have on Draco."

"Then we have to tell him," Evan said, although he wasn't at all sure that his cousin was right. After all, if it was a lie he'd told her, it was one she wanted to believe. Almost had to.

Spike tapped uneasily on the tablecloth. "I don't think you ought to be the one to tell him he might have to change his arrangements again," he told Narcissa. "And if he has to hear _anything_ about Bellatrix, it shouldn't be from me. And I would much prefer you," he looked at Evan, "to stay largely off his radar. His disinterested reliance is a precious resource, and besides, I like to be able to sleep when there's time for it."

Narcissa made a subtle face that, if she'd been Regulus, would have been a loud gagging noise. Of course, if she'd been Regulus, she'd probably have meant it and not been decorously covering up for wanting to ruffle their hair and coo and possibly take photographs of them in compromising positions to give to her husband.

Severus ignored her, which was safest. "So how do we do this like Slytherins?"

And just like that, Evan relaxed. Leaning easily back in his chair, he said, "Start a rumor, of course."

"Of _course!_ " Narcissa exclaimed, brightening in relief as well.

"How do we do that?" Spike asked dubiously.

"You don't!" the cousins snarled in unison, turning on their sledgehammer with matching steel-blue eyes. Evan's were on the greener side of blue, Narcissa's closer to the silvery grey common in the Black family, but when they glared together there was no noticeable difference.

"It's all right if he sees you've noticed odd things about her," Evan added, drilling him, "but you _don't_ let him, or anyone, know you've come to anything _like_ a conclusion, and you don't bring it up with anyone but us. Especially not Reggie. You know how he is about her."

Spike put his beautiful hands up in a really quite good mockery of cowed. He meant his acquiescence, but his mouth was twitching. "Shall I go and let you get on with it, then?" he asked, all meekness.

"Severus, darling." Narcissa looked at him pityingly. She held out a hand for him to help her from the chair with, and then tucked it into his arm, leading them away from the tables and into the weekend-crowded street.

Evan, taking this as his signal to box up and shrink the leftovers, wasn't convinced any of the Blacks had ever heard of paying on the spot. His mum certainly hadn't. He only wondered whether Narcissa had made the arrangements while ordering or just had an account with every shop and eatery in the Alley she'd be seen dead in.

With Severus safely trapped, Narcissa finished, "You didn't really think you were getting out of the tailor's, did you?"

"I did not," he admitted with a mix of gloomy resignation and gallantry so well done it had Evan wishing they were going to the kind of clothier's that had private changing rooms, "in truth, imagine my accomplices so flighty. But a man may dream, and a serpent must strive."

Since there weren't going to be any changing rooms, Ev deflated his daft lexophile with a poke in the ticklish bit, and then had to make a break for it.

Always the better runner, especially through affronted crowds, Spike had him collared well before he made it to Twillfit and Tatting's. The day Evan Rosier couldn't pull a pursuer between two buildings and make them forget why they'd been chasing him until help arrived, though, he'd bleach his school scarf. And the day he couldn't distract Spike would be Ragnarok Eve.

* * *

* It is. Relaxing the muscles between one's eyebrows is a known calming technique, and is probably the important part of the 'half-smile' some therapies practice. Holding it in place is not required.


	30. Still Diagon, Barely Later

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter's day is about to get much, much better. Even his whole summer. His life as a whole, on the other hand...
> 
> (yes, that was insensitive. but you know what, he literally did it to himself.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** for... actually, no, I'm not going to warn you. Return of a character from the prequels.

Peter was about ready to give up traveling by foot, even if it was the only thing keeping his weight down. He couldn't see any difference in his mirror, and neither could his mirror. Regardless, he was convinced by now that it wasn't his imagination: everyone he passed was sure, on sight, that they didn't like him. When the department sent him out to deal with some problem, the people who'd called it in didn't like him. He was treated curtly in shops, couldn't catch publicans' eyes, and in restaurants sometimes his food was cold by the time it got to him.

He was considering asking for a transfer to some nice, dusty office, although two months ago he would have called that torture. Solitary confinement would be better than the contempt he saw everywhere.

It wasn't just from strangers, either. His co-workers were getting fed up with the case of clumsiness he'd developed, and they were starting to get the idea that he was bringing down the reputation of the department. Which he was: no matter how competent his work was, he didn't pull in the thanks he'd used to, as the rest of them still did.

Sometimes there were actual complaints. These never seemed to be about anything specific. He thought, resentfully, that it was only natural they wouldn't be: seven years of trying to manage the aftermath of the Potter-Black brains trust had left him very good at what he did, which included being nice and inoffensive. Still, his superiors knew he was, somehow, rubbing people the wrong way, and they were neither pleased nor patient.

His friends treated him as they always had, and most of him still felt their warmth and welcome as an oasis. But Pete saw variations on dislike everywhere, now he was so familiar with what it looked like. He couldn't not-see it in them anymore: Lily's disinterested tolerance, Moony's capital-p Patience, the resentment in his lingering gratitude. The way James was kind to him, the way one would be to a child.

Sirius, of course, had never been subtle about looking down his nose at Pete. And while it had always made him Pete's least favorite (he hated how much it flustered him, and once that started it just spiraled worse and worse), it was, really, just Sirius; didn't mean anything. He'd be snide about anyone except Remus, including (especially) James. Pete had, almost from the beginning, been resigned about the combination of proximity and not having Remus's arcane and indefinable superpowers meaning he was always going to take more flak than most.

He still knew that, in his head, but it rubbed him worse and worse in practice these days.

He'd wondered whether he might have picked some curse on the job without noticing, but this didn't match up with any of the ones he knew. He'd thought of asking around, but… there was some deep part of him that knew he was kidding himself. He was never going to be the same after the park, that was the long and the short of it. Somehow people could sense it on him.

Someone bumped him, and he barely reacted. It was something else he was getting more of lately. Not fifteen minutes ago, a red-headed streak of lightning in a velvet waistcoat had knocked him down, and its pursuer's Quidditch boots had stormed down about four inches from Pete's nose. No one had looked inclined to help him up, or ask if he was all right.

But, "Oh, it's you," said a voice. It was of the drawling type, but not unfriendly.

He looked. Sirius's brother was arm in arm with… one of those other Slytherins Lily had always been in a steam about, he wasn't sure of the name. A Slytherin was a Slytherin in their dormitory, unless it was a relative or Snape. "Oh, hullo."

"Sorry about that other night," Black said. "Caught me at a bad time." He explained to his companion, "I ran into Pettigrew right after the Malfoys made all their arrangements about the baby. Afraid I was a bit the worse for it."

"Poor pet," she commiserated. "Herself wasn't pleased about that at all, was she." But she was looking at Peter, and it was the kind of look he hadn't gotten in weeks and weeks. He felt himself turning a bit pink, and tried to look at her more closely without being obvious. She was a lovely little thing, all creamy skin and chestnut hair and long, long legs for her height, and she was saying, "Reggie, aren't you going to introduce us?"

"Do you need it?" Regulus asked, startled. "Weren't you in the same year?"

"Oh, but we didn't mix," she said, and dimpled at Peter. "Everyone's so cliquish at school, aren't they? It's that awful House Cup, everyone thinking it's mixing with the enemy to mix at all."

"And it may be treason to say it, but Quidditch doesn't help," Peter agreed, extending a hand. "Peter Pettigrew."

"That is treason," Black agreed, not seeming to particularly care. But then, he'd probably had more than his fill of incoming Bludgers by the time he'd left school.

Not Pete's Bludgers, though. During Slytherin games, Pete had largely, although not exclusively, concentrated on Snape. The Slytherins always pulled Snape off reserve for Gryffindor games. Pete had no idea why the very creepy menace had put up with it, but cared nothing at all about Snivellan masochism and a great deal about not disappointing James. Not being brain-dead, he'd always left it to Sirius to try and knock his little brother out of the sky.

"Lucy Wilkes," the witch smiled, taking his hand. She had a good shake, firm and warm, just slightly lingering. "It's Lucrezia, really, but who can be bothered with all of that?"

"Lucrezia's a beautiful name, if you ask me, but I hear you," Pete smiled back. "Even two syllables are too many for my friends. You can call me Pete, if you like."

"I do like," she said, but she said it to Regulus. "He's like a baby angel, isn't he?"

Regulus eyed Pete dubiously. For the first time in weeks, Pete didn't mind. "If you say so," he shrugged. "Any particular reason you were plastered to Eeylops' window, Pettigrew?"

"Thinking about giving them some custom," Pete admitted. He was on the point of giving up fighting the conclusion that he'd be safer getting his groceries by owl order.

"Well," Lucy said, stepping up and slipping her arm into Pete's. "I don't know how _you_ did in Creature Care, but my NEWT was excellent. Suppose I help you choose one?"

"Well, that would be—that's very kind of you," Pete said, just barely managing not to stammer. She smelled like vanilla and jasmine and some sweet fruit he didn't know. Since she'd done well in CoMC too, they'd have something to talk about right from the beginning. "I'd hate to impose."

"Not a bit of it," she said. "Although…" she glanced down at her shoes, and gave them a flick with her wand. The heels shrank, and suddenly she was just his height. "There! That's better, now I won't have to worry about being stepped on by giraffes. Slope off, giraffe," she instructed Black, in case he'd been slow off the mark.

"Hecate preserve us," Black uttered, eyeing her with a little headshake. "I'll pull her off you if you like, Pettigrew; I owe you one for not laughing when I was pie-eyed."

"Don't trouble yourself," Pete told him. " _Please_."

"Right-oh," Black said amiably, and bent down to give Lucy a chaste peck on the cheek. "Tomorrow, then, Wilkes?"

"Seven-thirty," Lucy agreed. "Don't be too shocked if I bring a plus-one."

"All right, but tell me before noon so I can tell Severus he's off the hook during his lunch break," he said. "No offense, Pettigrew, but I'm not risking my dinner party on everyone behaving like a grown-up on short notice."

"No offense taken," Pete barely had time to say, fervently, before Lucy was moving gracefully towards the owl emporium's door, pulling him gently after her.

Eeylops, probably impressed by the loveliness on his arm, treated Pete just like any other customer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes** : Originally, this chapter was a gasp-huge-surprise. What with the way Tom had been grumble-dealing with Wilkes-the-lech and all, it was going to be a Big Reveal that she was a witch and less than objectively vile. I'd originally envisioned him as a wizard who was, see. But then I went back and did the prequels and she just refused not to be her and have a relatively big role in them... oh well.
> 
> Yes, the 'baby angel' was on purpose. Yes, that's what Petunia 'often called' her ickle Dudleykins. I regret ~~everything~~ nothing. :D


	31. #18 Dye Urn, Next Evening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Evan comes home from an interminable dinner party, whose implications he might have more fully grasped at the time if he'd needed less of his uncle's excellent elf-wine to get through it without glassing Wilkes' plus-one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : Undercurrent plot. Much brewing. Evan is a handsy drunk. FEELS.
> 
>  **Because I Posted Before Purim Bonus Story** : Several hundred years ago, a beautiful Slytherin petted and coaxed and impressed and only-slightly tricked her liege lord, who was the hedonistic and entitled rather than the on-the-ball type of very rich ruler, into making it legal for her people to fight back against a planned massacre his second in command had mandated. This was an even more impressive feat considering that he married her for her looks, after divorcing his last queen for refusing to come display herself as after-dinner entertainment for his guests. The second in command was hanged, and now every year we make noise and tell the story and eat cookies filled with gooey fillings and shaped like his tricorn hat. Which is fairly macabre when you think about it, but then, so was he. And that is, in (very) brief, the whole megillah.

"Merlin's staff, you're beautiful," Evan sighed, hazily rapt.

"Nimue's kirtle, you're drunk," returned Severus, without skipping a beat or turning.

"No, look at you, all happy and stirring things with all the knives going," Evan purred, slipping his arms around his cynic and letting his fingers spread. "Hullo, brewer's build…"

The room was _much_ less spinny now. Severus could insist all he liked that, as a saturnine Capricorn, if he was to be compared to any wand wood it ought to be holly or yew, but he was always oak to Evan (when he wasn't sly, insinuating tongues of grass): sturdy and unshakable, a nearly-stone tower coming up from practically nothing and bending to no one. Not at the core, no matter how bare a cold wind stripped him or how hard his leaves might be ruffled, might make him seem to turn and twist. His Gryffie mother had raised him too upright to lie well _at all_ , but that didn't cripple him even among serpents: he could illusion with the best of them. And there he always was at the core, straight and stern and disapproving everything with the most-hidden-possible of private smiles keeping him green and supple.

"You are _incredibly_ drunk," Severus decided, but he leaned back into Ev as he kept stirring, let Evan undo his buttons down to the top of his waistcoat and untie his cravat. He must have started brewing as soon as he got home from work. "I take it I missed something dreadful?"

"Oh… not so… yes," he decided. "Useful, but dreadful. Good thing you weren't there, you would have turned it into a complete catastrophe."

"Smooth, Slick Silvertongue."

"And yet I am so very right. Either a disaster or you would have just sat there sullenly radiating _get me out of here!_ and ruined it quietly for everyone. What are you making?"

"Liquid luck; been on the schedule for my next free evening solo for weeks. I wish I had some stored now, so six months on we may need it badly, if it's not too late."

"Gloom an' doom," Evan mumbled into his throatstrings. "How much longer?"

"Some time yet, I'm afraid." He crooked a finger at a cutting board, which floated over to him, and dropped a pinch of something green and frothily leafy into his cauldron. He replaced his wooden stirring rod (Evan thought it was the cedar one but didn't much care) with the jade one, and circled it in the other direction, slowly.

Evan sighed heavily down his collar, and smiled to feel him shiver. He rested his cheek on Spike's shoulder and stood there for some minutes, dropping the occasional slow kiss but mostly just feeling him move. Reggie had to direct the cleaning-up and go to a cold bed all alone, no one but Kreacher to scold and put up with him, and Kreacher didn't even give good hugs, and it _served Reg right._ Asking Evan _that._ Probably he'd had to, but _ugh_.

"What was so dreadful at Grimmauld?" Spike asked eventually, when the activity had subsided into a stretch of mostly-stirring.

"To begin with, Wilkes dragged in this drab little low-level MLE mouse," he said. "We were all supposed to make nice with him, Spike. I didn't really want to."

"I'm sure you were the very soul of charm."

"Yes, but, I mean, really. Ugh. Twitchy. Buck-teeth. Tweed."

"Your suffering is tragic," Spike chuckled, craning to kiss him on the temple.

"I don't know how you can stand to be near me," he said mournfully. "I must reek of _eu de red tape._ "

"I can very nearly stand to be near you even when you reek of linseed oil, turpentine, and unsubtle, lazy-arse fishing for compliments. How was Bellatrix?"

"Oh, good news there." Evan stopped snickering into his neck, although he didn't actually sober up. "Because, not good. Cissa and I already had the word out on the vague, and there she was, corroborating away like anything. No one could miss it. He'll be hearing from everyone else, I expect, so we're raising eyebrows down our channels, too. Wouldn't do to be left out. Reggie was thoroughly spooked, poor kid. You should keep laughing," he added. "That was nice."

"Make me," Spike invited.

"Too drunk," he said sadly, winning another laugh thereby. They stood in comfortable silence while Severus worked, stood for so long Evan realized he might actually fall asleep. Falling asleep meant falling down, and Spike would be very cross with him if the potion was botched, even if they had a stillroom left afterwards. Rousing himself, therefore, he asked, "What's the music?"

"Bartok. Hungarian."

"It's all sprites and shivery," he noted.

"Suits the potion, don't you think?"

"Goes right to the bones. Not your usual."

"This one's delicate; I wanted a finer energy to work under."

"You've found that. But aren't you done yet?" he asked plaintively.

"Soon, thorn," Severus assured him, and started doing things that made fizzy noises. It was one of Evan's favorite things to hear ever ever ever, Spike saying _all yours soon, Ev_.

And all Spike's shirts were very thin, because he tended to layer, and very soft, because he wore them to rags and also because rustling noises when he moved annoyed him. The waistcoat and brewing apron were iniquitous brutes and needed to die, but the shirt barely interfered between his face and Spike's wiry shoulder, which was a match made somewhere kind. And the music just slid right into Ev's blood and zinged all through him, sweet and pure, and even if he didn't know what it meant…

Did Severus know what it meant?

"You don't speak Hungarian?" he asked suspiciously, raising his head a little.

"No…?"

"Good, because Crouch's pater has about twelve languages and it's not natural, Spike. You're bad enough as you are."

"I'm very terribly bad," Spike agreed, bemused. "Me and my heinous wanting to be able to talk to the really good brewers and read things in the original. Dreadful. Twirl my moustache for me, will you? My hands are full."

Evan took a moment to visualize that. Spike's face, he realized, was absolutely _made_ for a pointy little goatee. He'd be mobbed by suspicious Aurors, and by small children assuming he was part of a panto. There would be auugh-I'm-being-stalked hexing and Ministry interference and… "Spike?"

"Mm?"

" _Promise_ me."

"Er… what?"

"It's _very important._ "

" _What_ is?"

_"Never wear a moustache."_

"…Er... no fear?"

"Out of bed."

"…I'm amazed you're still upright. Remind me to pour a gallon of water down your throat and put some Hangunder by the bed."

" _Stop_ that," Evan growled. He bit Severus's shoulder in reprimand through dark linen and got a little jolt and gasp for his trouble, just gorgeous friction all down his front. "Keep insulting my Spike and I'll go ask your mother if she raised you in a barn."

"I was not so fortunate as that. You should try one."

"A barn?"

"A…" Severus gestured aimlessly around his mouth and chin area before summoning a jar of very brown honey to drizzle carefully into the cauldron.

Evan considered. "You think it'd look good on me?" As long as it didn't come in brick red or anything; he'd never tried to grow his beard or moustache out. He'd heard it could be a bit of a gamble, when you were ginger.

"No idea. Thought it might feel good on me." And before Evan had finished processing those implications ('Thought!' Past tense!) and that prospect, or sorted out his eyes, which had crossed with pure lust, Spike slid smoothly back to business. The diabolical git. "Was Crouch being a pain?"

"Ohhhhmerrrrlinnnyessssss," Ev groaned, sadly diverted.

"Desist," Severus snapped. "This potion is _finicky_ , and when it goes wrong it goes badly wrong. I'll be done soon." Not sharply at all—sly, even—he added, "You can do it some more then."

"Mm, expect I will."

Severus raised a hand, gestured so that a different jar of honey hovered over the cauldron and started to dispense one drop at a time at regular intervals, and caressed Evan's lips and throat on the way down to pick up his stirring rod again. "Crouch?"

"I was sitting across from him," Evan lamented, into Spike's neck again because the too-swift brush of fingers had left his mouth feeling not just cold but rather indignant about it. "He's so _wet_. Like one of those little dogs that's all hair and humidity with its tongue out."

"At least you weren't sitting next to Wilkes. Or were you?"

"Reggie likes me, Spike," he said reproachfully. Wilkes had taken it as a personal challenge when Evan's interest in bedmate variety had faded. He still liked her. She was fun. Now, though, he more or less understood why she fussed Spike, who she'd always seen as a challenge, into knots.

Besides, she'd brought _Pettigrew_ to dinner. This was obviously For A Reason. It would have been obvious even if it hadn't been Reggie who'd nervously asked Evan not to tell Spike. So Ev had put up with it. And he wouldn't have told Spike anyway; it would just have upset him.

But Evan had more of a problem with Pettigrew than he did with any of the other Gryffindor goons, and it wasn't just because the little weasel had more or less escaped karma so far. Sirius, although Cousin Alf had softened his disinheritance for him, had had his funds severely restricted. Evan himself had been responsible for blowing up Potter's wand that time, and for Lupin's inability to get a job with anyone but his friends. None of which Ev had exactly taken pleasure in, but it was _right_ that none of them had escaped a consequence they couldn't ignore.

Pettigrew had. His job with the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office wasn't a grand one. Calling the department an 'office' implied a bit of an overstatement of its status in the DMLE, and he was still low man on the totem pole after two years of working there. He'd only even scraped that by whinging about how yes, all the rumors about Potter and Black's awful behavior at school were true but what could he have done, they were completely out of control. But it was a job, and he wasn't dependent on Potter for it.

Just his having escaped Evan's net-of-truth trap alone would have been an annoyance, but his whining had been a _complete lie._ Siri and Potter had been nothing _like_ out of his control. Evan had watched him egg them on a thousand times. All right, they might well have turned on him if they hadn't had another target, but he had _not_ been helpless. He'd had power, and choices.

And small though he was, he certainly hadn't been helpless with a Beater's bat in his pudgy little hands.

Severus had been incapable of sitting in the stands to watch people lob Bludgers at Evan and Reggie, so he'd joined up, so _of course_ he'd immediately become everyone's favorite target himself. _Which had been his intent, because he was a complete nutjob_. The only thing Evan could have done to make him stop would have been to quit the team himself. But if Evan had quit, Reggie would have transferred from Chaser to Seeker (which he did anyway, eventually, when Ev started really growing into himself and got too big for optimum speed), and Severus would still have flown to keep the Bludgers off him.

And if Reggie had quit, too, they would have had to use _Lockhart_ , because the twit brushed off everyone younger who they might otherwise have trained up. They'd never have won a game again. And Severus still would have played (if Lockhart had actually shown up on the pitch), because the idiot would have gotten himself killed out there and everyone knew it. Even odds whether that 'everyone' secretly included himself.

Severus didn't like Lockhart, exactly, but he'd always seemed to feel a bit responsible for him.  Maybe because they'd been left to sit together at table too often, or maybe because rescuing Lockhart (much against his will) from a much-older creep had been the first thing Severus had ever magnificently failed at until Evan did it for him.  That had been what had first really brought them to each other's attention.  So maybe he felt he'd failed Lockhart by not rescuing the baby-idiot himself, or maybe he felt he owed him in a way Lockhart was never going to be allowed to know about.

And, really? If it hadn't been Lockhart, it would have been one of the baby snakes, and Severus would have been just as protective about them, if on a more impersonal level.

And Pettigrew had gone after him like he'd win twenty points for every bruise. For him, a smile from Potter was probably worth more. And he'd set Siri and Potter on Spike a thousand times. And the worst part…

Siri and Severus hated each other, well known fact. Loved, loved, loved scoring points off each other, came away from fights charged and crackling and alive. Oh, they knew how to get under each other's skins, yes, and it could get vicious when they were shouting and hissing at each other. Their silent fights, though, wands at a distance or on the pitch, could be positively gleeful. Sirius would laugh out loud when Severus made a clever play, and Severus's eyes sparked _oh, you're a Black after all!_ when Sirius did. Their after-game threat-offs were often positively cheerful. They'd spend hours reverse-engineering each other's spells, shout with unsneering delight when they worked each other's mad brains out.

They were just water and lightning, opposing forces drawn together, hurting each other almost every time they came together. Hating each other and thinking the worst and feeling slapped and looked down on and rejected and judged because of that pull, that magnetic-madhouse mirroring, that elusive _if only_. If things had been different, if they could have lined up as allies… but as matters stood, they really couldn't help themselves.

Potter and Severus, conversely, didn't hate but despised each other. Got absolutely ugly together. No ambiguity, nothing complicated, not beloved opposition, just an unadulterated two-way sneer. Just the loathing between a clever, creative, troll-skinned, and idealistic things-are-and- _should-_ be-simple thinker and an oversensitive and also-creative polymath whose own idealism was harder thought out and far more complicated. There was just no respect there, on either side. Their philosophies were in opposition. More, Potter seemed to think Severus owed him something, which wasn't just laughable but contemptible. Thought it just showed how morally corrupt Severus was when Severus, naturally, laughed in contempt. Cold, pure, mutual revulsion, strong as anything.

But Pettigrew, Evan was sure, had had no particular feelings about Severus one way or another, except that he was a convenient hobby and distraction. _That_ was the thing. Lupin's feelings might have been tepid or might (more likely) have been complicated, but he only allowed trouble, he didn't make it. He was a nothing. Pettigrew wasn't nothing. He was ruthless and weak at once, and clever, and subtle, and he had a long-standing habit of deliberately hurting the only thing that made Evan feel connected with life. Crudely and publicly when he could, and more often so indirectly that it couldn't be traced back to him.

And Wilkes was courting him, and Reggie was asking Evan to be both sweet and secret about it. Of course Reggie liked Ev, but there were far better reasons than friendly consideration for him not to have asked Evan to smile all evening from the seat _quite_ next to Lucy's plus-one.

The odds were that Pettigrew thought Evan was a nothing, if a rather handsome one who'd given his hero a good race for the Snitch more than once. Most people did—and Evan didn't assume he was definitely right about Lupin, either. Siri felt strongly about him in some way Evan couldn't put his finger on, was living with him, and Siri was mental, not unselfish or shallow or stupid.  Ev could spot a parallel when it bit Spike's nose right in front of him (it was a quite substantial nose, after all, rather noticeable, and no one was allowed to bite it but him).

Being underestimated was an advantage, and one Evan preferred not to lose by glassing the little bastard in the eye with half a bottle of Uncle Orion's excellent _Kloster Giltwald_ and drowning him in the grindylow bisque. Aunt Walburga wouldn't mind (Voldemort might; Reg had no personal reason to ask Ev to play nice with one of Siri's horrible friends), but there was really no excuse for descending to the thuggish little cockroach's level. It would, as Ev's mum would say, lack elegance.

Still, Reg hadn't _had_ to minimize the temptation. Lucy wouldn't have, if it had been her party. But Lucy had always been a sadistic ass, albeit of the impish rather than the malicious sort. Reggie was a sweet kid. Evan wished he knew a way to get the sweet kid out of killing people at night. He still turned to them, so there was no giving up looking for one.

"Of course Reg likes you. My apologies." He couldn't see Severus's face, but he could hear the smile.

"Mm. Anyway, she looked very happy with the whoozit."

She had, too. But Evan never had understood Lucy's taste in bed-friends. She liked Ev and Narcissa and Reggie, which was only natural, and she liked Spike (mostly against his will), which was unusually perceptive. She'd had lots of fun with lots of people at school, most of whom had good qualities without being overall-spectacular. Evan had made fond memories with many of her conquests himself in his fourth and fifth year, some of which she'd been enthusiastically present for. She hadn't been particularly keen on Mulciber, who wasn't a very nice person at all but was fun, smart, good-looking, good with his hands, clever with his wand, pleasant enough most of the time, and had been quite keen on her.

She had, however, spent an _inexplicable_ amount of time tumbling Avery. About the only quality Avery had that Evan could think of as attractive was his beefiness. And even that Ev was more inclined to call lumpiness, although he was certainly strong. And he was crude, and sweaty, and the sort of Slytherin who had Sorted not because of how he used his brain but because he didn't hesitate to do or take what he wanted.

When Severus had achieved the Holy Grail of a privacy spell that would work in the Hogwarts dorms, in their fifth year, quite a lot of Evan's fervent gratitude was because Severus was intensely private. The idea of their roommates hearing how raw and glad they were just starting to be able to crack each other open had made him sick. He hadn't even wanted them knowing what he could do to Evan, let alone what he might let Evan see of him. Evan wouldn't have been fussed about snogging in the common room, himself, but nothing (in the world) was ever any good when Severus felt like that.

The muffliato made nights private enough for Spike to be happy in, helped make their tied-together-with-scarves bed a place away from Gryffindors both marauding and green-eyed, and from Slytherin politics, too. It let him feel secluded enough to relax and play, or slip the chains on the force-of-nature focus he'd kept strapped down and buttoned in all the time. Even to let Ev coax and wrench out the solemn eyes-only smiles and lost, helpless notes that meant he was safe in Evan's hands. Ev hadn't realized how thoroughly he was losing himself in them, back in their fifth year, losing his happy-go-lucky detachment and dispassionate geniality to them, until spring had punched Spike in the throat and dimmed his quick black eyes to dreary charcoal.

But almost as many of Ev's hallelujahs over the muffling charm had been because Avery's wet, grunting bed noises made _him_ sick. Sometimes Lucy Wilkes' taste was explicable, and sometimes it really was not.

"Wouldn't she be happy with him, if she brought him?"

"Severus Severus Severus," he shook his head, lamenting again. "Unicorn in my _Schwarzwald_."

"Do I need to detoxify you this instant?" Spike laughed. Twisting, he managed to land a kiss on Evan's temple.

"The dupe was being _courted,_ baa-lamb," he explained, nuzzling in, letting his hands wander where they wouldn't make too terribly much trouble. Severus was getting too skinny again, though his work always kept him firm up top. They needed to get out more, play more Quidditch, whip up his appetite. Evan wouldn't mind more fresh-air exercise himself, although indoor exercise was always… how long did Felix Felicis take before it went on the simmer, anyway, for pity's sake? "She was being a… who was that one from the war before Grindelwald got rolling?"

"I need more than that, Ev."

"With the confounding cryptowhatsis. And the glamour dances. Sacrificed a transfigured rat to a firing squad and went to teach Arithmancy at Durmstrang."

"Mata Hari?"

"That one."

Severus's back shifted uneasily. "Don't mistake me, I'd cheerfully chop Wilkes off at the wrist, but…"

"I could tell if she were faking it, Spike," he said sleepily. "She likes the little oik. He's enthralled and attendant and he _likes_ her lack of use for personal space."

Of course he did. Probably no one had paid him that much positive attention in his life. Evan was fully aware that Siri, in particular, hadn't been particularly veiled about the condescension in his friendship, even that it had sometimes turned to real contempt. Of course Pettigrew was vulnerable to Lucy's lewd and cheerful liking, usually shallow but never fake. He'd been a moderate success with the Hufflepuff girls, but they weren't an artful bunch. Some of Evans's friends had been kind to him—and how that must have rankled.

"Bad precedent, though."

"Nobody has to tell Wilkes to—"

"Not her," Spike agreed apprehensively, "and not yet. Even if she volunteered… I think I'd better have a word with her."

"…Er."

"No, Evan, this is the kind of talk I didn't pass to you. Even in Slytherin, some things need blunt."

"She'll tell you to nose out, Spike. And there's not many who'd blame her. Her affairs are her affair, you know? You wouldn't like it, if someone came nosing around to tell us how to act."

"They wouldn't like it in the end, either," Severus noted, with one of his razor-thin scimitar smiles.

"My point exactly. And we're not in school now; you can't flash my badge at her."

"I do not give a single damn. If it were just her affair, yes, but it's _His_ affair—oh, damn, now you've got me doing it."

Evan grinned despite himself and his concern that the Wilkes family was about to land stiletto-first between his partner's wand-hand metacarpals.

Severus stepped on Ev's foot, even though he'd been looking apparently quite carefully at the pooka-hoof he'd been grating and there hadn't been any reflective surfaces in that direction. "I _mean,_ " he huffed, but was grim again when he continued, "it doesn't just affect her. If she doesn't handle this so carefully that no one gets the idea that she's 'doing a job' instead of 'pleasing herself while doing a job,' she'll wish we _were_ still under school rules."

"You know, _she's_ not under school rules anymore, either, Severus," he said unhappily. "If she wants to enforce a mind-your-own-business…"

"Ev," Severus said tightly, "I don't want anyone even _thinking_ about telling me, when I'm activated, that it is my business."

Evan stilled, his veins icing.

"Evan? Evan, ribs. I have some. Just there. They don't bend that way."

"You know," he said contemplatively, forcing his arms looser, "I was really enjoying being drunk there for a minute."

"Alas." Oh, yes, Spike was definitely laughing at him. Better, better, everything better to that choked-back tremolo, he didn't have to see the bitten-flat mouth or dancing eyes to know how they looked…

Still, that hadn't been nice, dumping ice water like that right over his head. "It was quite good wine, too," he said reproachfully. "Not what it would have been if Reg's parents had been the hosts, but still, very good. Perfect level of drunk, too, warm but not sloshy…"

"I bleed for you. Really. Listen carefully, you'll hear the sad violins. Wait, wait—here comes the cello."

"You're the cello." Best music in the world. Although this was quite nice. Much nicer than Spike's usual very loud and energetic brewing music.

On the other hand, he sang along with that quite a lot, and stirred and chopped in rhythm. He _claimed_ Belby had taught him it was the best way to keep one's stirring patterns straight, but Evan had shared a bedroom and common room with him and his homework for seven years, paid attention to him for more than five of them. Brewing was art in his blood and music in his bones, that was all there was to it. Evan could watch and listen for whole minutes at a time before he found himself with his arms and mouth full of (moderately) surprised potions swot, quite often on top of a workbench that had previously been covered in books and papers (but never ingredients. Yeurgh).

He was fairly good about not pouncing at a volatile moment. He'd taken a NEWT in potions himself, although not an O, and could usually tell when a cauldron was at a delicate stage. The minutes could even be counted in double digits, usually, if he had a sketchpad or canvas to hand.

"…If you say so," Spike acceded, bemused.

"Bass?"

"Anything you like."

Evan sighed. Severus being agreeable instead of crying _nonsense_ meant he was really too worried to play. "I'll talk to her tomorrow."

"No, Ev, this one's mine. I'll tell her it's Narcissa I'm worried about; Luke might catch something."

Surprised, he laughed, and settled down on Spike's back again, letting the music's strange, pure semitones wash into him. "Do you think you could do it?" he asked idly, feeling him breathe.

"I think someone would die before I tried. Or wish they had."

"Yes, obviously, but do you think you _could_?" He grinned into Severus's shoulder. "I mean, not everyone appreciates you like I do, Naj."

The stirring arm paused for the tiniest of moments. "Let me unwrap that," Spike said slowly, dark and cold and silky. "Did you just ask me if I could overcome my every feeling and my _face_ to cold-bloodedly attract someone to be unfaithful with?"

"I'm terribly concerned about your success 'once activated,'" Evan said piously, snuggling in and rolling up as lewdly as he could manage without actually making Spike wreck his potion, peppering his words with sucking kisses scattered over Spike's shoulders, the back of his long neck, the tops of his strong, spare arms, pulling his loosened collar around to get right to the pale skin, milky against the moss-grey linen, wherever he could. "And I know how difficult insincerity is for you. I think you should, mmm, Spike. You should practice."

A long pause, infinitely less dangerous than the short one. Not that the dangerous one hadn't had its high notes. Or, to be precise, its ravishing, spine-tingling low notes. "You think I should practice," Severus repeated, beginning to sound amused.

"You should," Evan confirmed, using his nails to good effect through the waistcoat and linen, nuzzling at prominent nubs of spine. "Suppose you finish here, and meet me in the kitchen. I mean coffeehouse."

"You are absurd," Severus declared, _finally_ turning around and returning his embrace, sweet and tight and heated. Through the snug fuzz of being kissed, really quite possessively, by his favorite person while just buzzed enough to be sleepily swimmy, he heard the stirring rod swish rhythmically away, moving by itself, and the beginnings of tiny little splashes.

Pulling away about a week and a half before he really wanted to, he said, "My absurdity awaits you in the coffeehouse. And because I'm both absurd and too good to you, we'll say you're expected."

"Or you could wait five more minutes," Severus parried, hands laced at the small of Evan's back, "and we can do your nonsense if and when I'm sure the odds of its having to be anything but fluff are as low as they should be. Really, Ev, isn't rubbing all over me for an hour mood-building enough for you? I assure you, I found it was."

"Oh, so you did," he observed happily, pressing tighter again and dipping his head down quickly to capture the little gasp. Severus could purr almost literally and he couldn't, but he felt like it. "Five minutes?"

"Well, seven."

"Should I go get—"

"No," Spike cut him off softly, stroking once, too lightly, down his face, over his mouth. "No. Stay here with me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes: During the initial post, some readers had a sad that only single!Evan (as found in the [gen version](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9920703/31/Valley-of-the-Shadow-gen) on ffnet) gets read The Odyssey with the voices. Do not be fooled because he was rattled and clingy today. For proof of equal-opportunity bedtime reading, check back to the last Voldemort chapter (ch 22), final paragraph. Or, for a squishier and less pissy mention, chapter 17, paragraph ending with 'floo directory.' Because pair-bonded!Evan totally gets read to, and often does the reading. It just tends to get interrupted...


	32. Undisclosed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Dark Lord had problems even before he found out his shiv is a crap liar, but Severus is going to need to produce more than a flask of aspirin-equivalent to keep his feet under him as the floes of his master's soul begin to drift apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** for SLYTHERIN! \o/ And Language. Er, the groan-kind, not the profane kind. Because Severus.  
>  (Really, it's him, it just _happens_.)

"My lord?"

Voldemort looked up, rather glazed. "Not tonight, Severus," he said. "I have a headache."

The boy's face underwent a series of convulsions. He quickly spun on his heel, presumably until he could get control of himself. Voldemort couldn't even get up the spirit to be angry. A lot of silent back-shaking and several deep breaths later, his man turned around again and offered, "Would you like a potion, my lord? I always carry that sort of thing. It never happens that no one needs something."

Voldemort weighed the possibility that Snape had been waiting for an opportunity to poison him. It was entirely unlikely, and in the dark eyes he saw only adolescent but sympathetic humor.

He held out his hand. Despite his assessment of the odds of treachery, he was still pleased to see that the offered phial wasn't full, and had residue lines above the surface of the brownish liquid.

Pouring a dose into the cap and drinking, his eyebrows rose. "Not a standard draught," he noted. Severus looked offended at the very idea. He chuckled, gesturing for his man to sit at his feet. Miraculously (as magic was miracle tamed), laughing didn't hurt. Returning the phial, he asked, "You altered it for flavor?"

"Flavor was a consideration," his young potioneer admitted, "but my concern was more that the standard draught doesn't target muscle tension, which is the cause of a headache as often than not. It's also more effective than most when the headache has been magically imposed; I used to get that kind a lot."

"Quite," the Dark Lord agreed, and rubbed at his temples with long, pale fingers. As he returned the phial, he caught a whiff of scorched air. He inquired, "You've been dueling, Severus?"

"Not dueling, sir. I just… saw an indiscretion coming and needed a word with someone."

"Do I need to know about this, my own?"

"I think it's taken care of now, my lord. Just a little matter of, er, decorum. One gets in the habit of stopping certain people from making asses of themselves."

Voldemort ran a quick list of who this one might have routinely seen making an ass of him or herself and had the power to stop. Instantly alarmed, he leveled a thunderhead look at the boy and demanded, "You haven't been chasing Lucrezia Wilkes off her target, I trust, Severus."

"No!" his man answered, surprised. "Quite the reverse, my lord: making sure she treats the assignment with sufficient care and seriousness. Her heart's in the right place, but she doesn't always know without being told when something mustn't be taken lightly."

"And how did you know about it at all?"

"I heard she had a new friend Regulus Black was encouraging his guests to welcome. And," he added darkly, "I know Wilkes."

"And just from that," Voldemort said softly, regarding his man with a proprietary little smile. He would have been less pleased if someone had spilled it to Severus about exactly who Lucrezia's new 'friend' was, even if finding out would have been clever of the boy and probably not really harmful in the long term. In the short term, that was a tantrum he was not interested in managing. "Well done, my own, but from now on, give them both a wide berth. Lucrezia can manage this best on her own, once her mind is put to it. These matters are delicate, most delicate between a witch and wizard."

"Yes, my lord," Severus agreed, nodding deeply enough to make it formal.

The Dark Lord was curious. Severus was perceptive, and he'd been wise to display no curiosity about Voldemort's display of weakness. Was all his wisdom self-preservation? Deciding to try the boy on a recent problem, he inquired, "Tell me, my own, have you ever had to convince a witch she has not fallen in your esteem?"

Severus's eyes flickered. Voldemort thought that was comprehension for a moment, but then he dropped them; it had most likely been the first shock of old pain revived. "I have, my lord," he said, low.

"Were you successful?"

The boy shrugged, a fitful clenching of one shoulder. "Possibly," he said, "but it didn't matter by then."

"This intrepid girl of whom you've spoken. Did she cry?"

"If she did, she would never have let me know it."

"Why would it not have mattered, if it was what you were trying to do?"

When his servant looked up at him, his eyes were full of all the banked, bitter rage Voldemort had always known was in there somewhere. Severus just shrugged again, though, ironic. "Misapplied effort. As it turned out, it wasn't my regard that was at issue. She didn't really like me very much. Or at least, I embarrassed her in front of her _friends._ " And there was the fury again, chilled and solid, before ruefulness melted it away. "I think she was glad of the excuse."

"How you must hate her," he encouraged softly.

The boy met his eyes squarely now, wry. "That would be easier, my Lord. Or cleaner, maybe. I just wish—" he sighed. "She was my first friend, and… She just became more and more her simplest self as we got older and life got more complicated. It was… upsetting at the time, the way I was learning to dissect greys and she just saw more and more in black and white. Blinded herself more and more to the things that were messy, or that she just didn't want to see. Now it's… it's sad, I suppose. I'd like to see her live long enough to grow up." With another twist of irony, "One always does fantasize about getting the apology least likely to be forthcoming."

He regarded his servant quizzically. "Did it never occur to you to maneuver her into understanding the black and the white, at least, more in line with your own sight?"

"Oh, it occurred to me, sir," Severus said grimly. "I don't know how much of the problem was my not being any good at it and how much was her complete lack of interest in changing her mind. Either way, no effect, except that she disapproved of my annoying her with ideas she disagreed with."

"I confess, my own," he said delicately, "that I have heard manipulation isn't one of your talents."

"It's not," Severus agreed plainly.

The Dark Lord resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Still, getting a straight answer from someone was novel, at least. Too, if Severus really was as bad at it as he seemed, someone else might have a chance, or magic might. Voldemort could use a fearless witch inclined to certainty. There were more ways than one to seduce a crusader.

"Supposing, then, that a second chance turns up for you to put this training into practice. I have brought you to a point where you are likely to be able to return alive to me, and to do most things I might ask of you that would require quick action. But if I ask you to turn minds to me, Severus, and if you must escape suspicion without concealing your presence entirely, I think you will have difficulty."

"Well, my lord, I'm not Narcissa. But I'm also not a sleep-deprived fifteen-year-old too busy looking over his shoulder to keep from tripping over his tongue anymore, so it shouldn't be quite as bad now. Besides," he said, with a fleeting look of flat exasperation, "she's exceptional in many ways. But I am _all for_ minimizing that difficulty, sir."

Voldemort looked down at him, and hissed for his snake to come and be petted. He felt an urgent need for an uncomplicated, stalwart minion he could trust not to go to pieces at the worst possible moment. "Lie to me," he said suddenly.

"Er… about what?"

The Dark Lord cast a long, hooded gaze down at his man. "This," he commented to the ghost of his illustrious ancestor, "is going to be worse than my dear Bella's hysterics, isn't it."

"My name is… is Theodore?" Severus offered, hopelessly game.

Voldemort sighed. "I'll consider the problem," he said. "But for now, Severus…"

"My lord?"

"Go home."

A pause. "My lord?"

" _Yes_ , Severus."

"Sev...? Ah, sir, my name is Octavian; I'm from London," his servant said, matter of fact and laughing a little at Voldemort's mistake in a perfectly friendly way, a little reluctant to have to correct him but uncompromising about his own name, looking up at him without standing. "I come from an old pureblood family. The Sorting Hat wanted to put me in either of the warm-colored houses, but I argued for Ravenclaw. I thought, growing up, that I might like to be an auror, but my potions marks forced me to choose another career. You have to be good at that, you know," he added self-deprecatingly, and shrugged with a trace of resigned regret gone warmly amused for childish dreams put away.

Voldemort stared at him. "What happened to 'My name is let me see now, oh, I have it, it's Theodore,' Severus?" he asked, whimsical with surprised pleasure.

"That was a lie, my lord, as you requested," Severus explained, entirely Severus again, only reporting and calm, neither cold nor inappropriately friendly. "But Octavian is my middle name, and I do live in London now. My mother's family is as pure as anyone's, one of the oldest, if not so wealthy or well-known as some anymore. And, well, the Hat said I lacked the capacity for the kind of detachment Ravenclaw looked for in her students, and I said if it didn't send me somewhere I'd learn to _think,_ I'd set _it_ on fire. Slytherin was our compromise. It _was_ largely because of my performance in potions that I chose a career not built around DADA. I said you have to be good at potions to be an Auror, which you do. I didn't say I wasn't."

A smile crept over the Dark Lord's face, and he clapped a hand on his man's arm, trailing off with a caress over his mark. "Well considered, my own," he said softly. "And still, go home. The seed of an answer wants as much cultivation as a fallow field."

"My lord?"

"Yes?"

"If I may, I'd like to ask whether Bellatrix will be all right."

"Why?"

"You said she was upset, just now. And she has been… it's difficult to know how to put it. She hasn't seemed like herself."

"I was under the impression you two didn't get on, Severus."

"I'm no fawn-eyed fan of anyone who fantasizes about flaying me with their fingernails just for fun, my lord, it's true. But if anything happened to her, people I do care about would be devastated. Besides, she's of great use and greater potential use for my… what, team? I played reserve for our House; I know better than to need to like a teammate."

"Her family needn't worry," the Dark Lord said, feeling the headache push fretfully against the pain-barrier of the potion again. "My devoted was eager for a task too heavy for one or two. The Lestranges' burden will be eased soon, whether she likes it or not."

And that explanation should leave her enough dignity to balance out her punishment, even for her. And it had been well deserved, whatever her unthinking, zealous pride said about her feelings for him. He certainly hadn't told the little ninny to drink from his cup, or write like a schoolgirl in his diary! He shouldn't have had to tell her not to!

At least she hadn't had the presumption to put on the jewelry. He'd learned a great deal from her folly—learned enough to suspect that any further audacity would have left her mad, fully possessed without his desire, or dead.

Not 'or dead.' 'And dead.' If she had gone mad, or become his walking, thinking mirror, he would have had little choice.

Still, done carefully, the chance to open herself to him again might prove motivating, at need. For brief periods. Or merely in potentia. And she'd sworn strong enough oaths to abide by the rules of _common sense_ that he'd been willing to leave the cup with her, as a sign she hadn't lost his favor entirely.

Really, of course, because she and Lucius between them did hold the safest vaults he could access. Lucius had been both willing and honored to accept custody of the diary again, once Voldemort had assured him his wife needn't be told and it was safe for him to put it in a box that would shield his house's wards from its emanations. He would have to be more creative in hiding the rest, but that was hardly his weak suit. If he could be sure that his connection to the despicable name of his birth had been truly forgotten, that no one would think to trace him back to his pathetic mother's very disappointing family…

"Thank you, my lord," Severus said, rising and offering him a respectful, unsentimental piece of a bow. As well he ought; Bella's welfare wasn't really any of his business.  Voldemort was glad to see he'd been using his moment of favor to good and timely effect, not stupidly pushing his luck. "They will be glad to know it."

"Severus?"

"My lord?"

"S.O.S? Really?"

"Hard to get a Beltane-begot* born on May Day, my Lord. Harder without wizarding resources. Pity Mam's worse-excuse-for-a-father-than-mine had his ears closed; she's not the sort to ask for help a second time."

Voldemort regarded his man, thinking about astrology, about ritual, about bulls and goats, about wands and cauldrons, about two-faced gods and coupling gods, about festival-raised magic that looked to the ignorant like mystery and blessing. Sometimes a number was just a number, but often, in the wizarding world, it wasn't. He did a quick calculation with what he now knew to be his servant's full name and frowned: the only ferocity in a numerological six was protective.

"I suppose," he said experimentally, "you don't hate him, either."

"Put it this way, sir. You may wish someone to move in certain company. Whoever I hate or don't, no one's worth sacrificing the value of my being able to say under veritaserum that my hands are unbloodied and no blood has been spilled on my account."

"Not even your tormentors'?"

"When I say 'no blood on my hands,' I mean heart's blood, soul's blood, dark blood. Murder, torture, violation. Scraps and self-defense have nothing to do with it. Commonly understood metaphor, my lord: perfectly fair usage."

"Not," the Dark Lord said contemplatively, "a lie."

"If Veritaserum wouldn't let me make the sweeping statement," Severus said, "it would let me make the meaningful one. I know that ability is a resource that's getting rarer, sir, as our strength grows in other areas. You needn't worry—I won't make you pull in some inept innocent who needs to be imperiused to do your inveigling and pass their interrogations; I won't see it squandered. Or spent at all, if I can help it. My word on it."

Voldemort looked at his set, rather brooding face, his distant eyes fixed on the table. A resource-conservation-oriented mind was also a rare resource among the Dark Lord's followers, most of whom had never known a day of want in their lives, had a piece of clothing frayed, torn, or outgrown that wasn't instantly repaired or replaced. "You have seen hunger, my own," he said quietly.

The boy's eyes didn't move. His mouth did, but it wasn't what anyone would call a smile. "Seen?" he asked absently. "Oh, well. One can't entirely avoid mirrors."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * If you think it ought to be merry-begot, I believe you're right.** However, in this case, Severus's preference for precision was defeated by his inability to say words like 'merry,' 'gay,' and 'fun' without dripping sarcasm. He does not use these words when he doesn't mean to be offensive, because he really, really can't. And, in case you were wondering (you weren't), that is indeed why he used 'queer' for 'homosexual' back in _Wicket_.
> 
> ** Although someone on ffnet suggested that might only be merry-begot if the parents weren't married during the relevant Beltane festival. I do not know. His were, but since he's not using that phrase I guess it doesn't matter?


	33. Wednesday, June 25, 'The Valley,' Godric's Hollow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lily receives an Ominous Missive, and James has been exposed to more house elf leg than he remembers asking for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : A relatively short chapter full of fpreg and Gryffindors.
> 
> (ducks tomatoes, eww)
> 
> Plot and Slytherins next time, I promise, I promise! —Oooh, a peach! Much better. ^.^

When James burst in, Sirius was watching Lily warily as she gazed almost through a grubby little envelope with a Muggle postmark on it. Not quite shouting, but loudly and intently, he started, "Padfoot, your—" and finished more moderately, "What's that?"

"It's from Petunia," Lily said, turning an upset face to her husband (yes, yes, that would be him; already was yesterday and would still be tomorrow!).

"It doesn't have another horrible vase inside, does it?" he asked with mock-apprehension.

"Don't be silly, James, you know perfectly well muggles can't do expandable space," she said—acerbically, so she was somewhat recovered. Mission accomplished and all that, well done him.

"Don't know why you're looking at it like it's going to explode, then," Sirius said, in a grumpy voice that meant Lily had been making him, horrors, _focus_ all afternoon. They were surrounded by books and papers and thin golden rods.

James gathered they'd been working on the MPPW (Making Probity Probes detect ill-Will) project. He also gathered, from the number of parchment scraps that had been balled up and thrown against the walls, that it hadn't been going well.

"Well, it might do," Lily said, with a brave little smile. "She wouldn't even come to the wedding, remember? What if it's bad news?"

"Give it here," James offered, "I'll Intercede In A Manly Way if she's challenging you to a duel or something."

She kept on smiling, but it had turned a bit wavery. "But Jamie, what if it's Mum and Dad?"

"Then I'll… I'll… I'm sure it isn't. Why would it be?" he said firmly, privately resolving that if it was, he'd obliviate her until after the baby was born, delay the funeral _somehow,_ and weather the screeching then. Even if he had to sleep at Padfoot and Moony's place or take Pete's sofa for a month. Shocks Were Bad, pretty much everyone had sat him and Sirius down and told them this about seven million times when she'd started really showing, so he understood it very clearly. "Give over, Lils."

He opened it, read the scant and ungracious lines, and let his face fall into a rictus of horror. "Quick, Sirius! The brandy! Lily—sit down—no, no, I mustn't, it's too terrible—"

"Oh, shut up, you horrible git," Lily laughed in relief, going to far as to relax onto Padfoot's shoulder. "What is it?"

"She's spawned," James told her, and handed the plain little card back.

"Prongs," said Sirius, pained, "mate, you don't use that word in front of a witch when she looks like a pufferfish herself." He grinned when Lily smacked him over the head with her wand. It left a halo of little illusory pufferfish that dived irately at his eyes for a few seconds, far more agile than he thought the real fish would have been, before dissolving into confetti-like light.

"Oh, dear," she said after a moment, making a pained face.

"What?" they chorused, Sirius more alarmed than James was.

"What a _name_ ," she said, shaking her head a little. "The poor little thing. I suppose she was thinking of Dudley Do-right, but…"

"Oh, hullo," Sirius said, his nose practically in the envelope. "There's a picture. So you wouldn't be curious enough to come by, d'you think, or because she just couldn't help herself bragging?"

_"Sirius!"_

"No?"

"…No, all right, probably," Lily admitted, sighing. "Let's say mostly that last one. Well, let's see."

They clustered around it dubiously. "I think that's a beach ball, Paddy," James eventually said, skeptical.

"No, look, it's got a hat. With a… a…"

"Bobble," Lily rescued him.

"It could still be a beach ball," James insisted.

"He takes after his father, that's all," said Lily gloomily. "The poor _thing_. Honestly, I swear, Tuney just trawled the whole world for the most boring man she could…" she sighed, and then brightened. "Well, it's good news, really, after all! I suppose it had better be a card back; I'd best not stop by unless she invites me, after all that trouble last time…"

Catching her reproachful look, James protested, "I was perfectly friendly! _I_ can't help it if he won't believe we don't use paper money."

"He could see you were laughing at him in your head, which is _not_ perfectly friendly, Jamie, yes, people _can_ tell, and you didn't have to go on about brooms…"

"He was telling me about _his_ thingy!"

"Car?"

"That, yeah."

"He has a car?" Sirius asked, brightening with interest.

"I guarantee you, Padfoot," said James solemnly, putting a hand on his mate's shoulder, "that if it belongs to that beefheaded idiot, it is the most pedestrian—"

"Ha, ha," Lily droned in an eye-rolling voice.

"—Dull, unamusing, uninteresting, middle-management—"

"All right, all right, no need to honk up a thesaurus," said Sirius, joining her in the eye-rolling. "Still, I'd like to see it…"

"You mean get your hands on it," Lily said, dimpling, "and rearrange its innards until its mummy-mechanic wouldn't recognize it."

"Excellent idea!" said Sirius happily. "Let's you and me go do it right now, Daisy!"

"You could at least make it Marguerite," she complained, grinning. "A little class, Sirius, please."

"Paugh!"

"I'm sorry, did you just say 'paw'?"

"I could say pfui if you'd rather," he offered generously. "Pshaw, even. Daisy, daisy, give me your answer true…"

"Oh, that's _much_ better," she droned, and turned the sunlight of her gaze back on James, where it belonged. "Sorry, Jamie, you were wanting to say something? When you came in."

"Oh, yeah," James said, his face tightening. "Siri, there's something up with your brother."

A portcullis slammed down on his friend's expression. "I don't have any brothers, remember?" he said sullenly.

" _Padfoot.._."

"Oh, fine," he said petulantly. "What's the perfect little squit done?"

"I don't know if he's done something," James said, finally sitting down. "But I was passing by Sni—Snape's lab," he corrected himself at the warning green flash at his side, "you know, wanted to see how they're getting on, since Moony says they won't let him in anymore," he lied.

"Professor Slughorn says they may be shut down after the August review," Lily put in, frowning.  "The St. Mungo's grant approval committee meets in August."

"After the Wizengamot's cleared its backlog," nodded Sirius, who knew more about the Ministry than he actually wanted to.  "They hold most of the major crimes cases till summer, unless there's a lot of public feeling, since Dumbledore can't be in court much during the school year.  And of course there's a lot of overlap, Everyone That's Anyone is always on all the committees."

"Are you still writing to Slughorn?" James asked, surprised.

"Well, of course, James!" she returned, equally surprised. "He's a dear old thing and he's very fond of me. Besides, he knows everyone, and he likes to talk."

"Should I ask Mum to have a word with—"

"Reggie?" Sirius prompted, his foot jittering on the carpet.

"Right—well, you know that nutter the Malfoys keep on as a house elf?"

"Sure, I've met Snivvy," said Sirius, with a truly beautiful nasty smile.

" _Sirius!_ "

"Chrysanthemum! Aren't you simply glowing, what's your secret?"

James pushed on with all appropriate haste. Which was, judging from his heart's love's expression, _really a lot_. He wished Sirius wouldn't bring Snape up around Lily; thinking about what he'd 'turned into' (read: always been) hurt her, but she regressed and got mean if she heard him talked about in plain terms. "I mean whatsisface, Donny? The one your grandfather gave them for a wedding present."

"Dobby," Sirius conceded. "Dunno if I'd call him a nutter, Jamie; he's all right. Just a bit, er, enthusiastic. Just the elf you want assigned to you if you're visiting and you've been sent to bed without supper; Mincy would listen to my parents, not just Grandad. What about him?"

"Well, he nearly ran me over on his way into the Wolfsbane lab," James told him. "And I oh Merlin did not need to see that much house elf thigh," he added with a tangential shudder.

Going on of his own accord before the light of his life could poke him (or think to question his story about why he'd been at Snape's lab), "Anyway, when he came out he was _literally_ hauling Snape out backwards by his lab robes. I mean, the man was still holding a bowl of, I dunno, powdered pearl or moonstone or something."

Snivellus had, instead of showing any surprise at seeing James, tossed the bowl to him like a muggle frisbee, with a sneered but technically polite request to take it back into the lab. That had rankled, hugely, especially the notable lack of iridescent powder flying everywhere.  Sheer showing off! But the project was to help Moony, after all, even if Snape worked there, so he had obliged. And the old coot running things had been muttering to himself about what use was a chief apprentice whose friends kidnapped him every half hour, so maybe Snape would be sacked soon.

He went on, "And he—the elf, I mean—was babbling all over himself about some creature and Master Regulus and how Snape had to come to your mum's house right away." At Sirius's half-risen look of alarm, he said hastily, "It didn't sound like Regulus was hurt himself."

Sirius half-settled again, uneasily. He asked, "Was it 'a creature,' or Kreacher?"

James paused, thinking back. "It might have been Kreacher," he allowed.

"Oh." Sirius shrugged. He still looked uneasy, but less panicky. "Well, Kreacher is getting on. And Reggie always was fond of the foul little toerag. Probably nothing to worry about," he added, in a tone that wanted to convince himself more than anyone else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : There is something to worry about.
> 
>  **Notes** : Holding certain court cases to all be held at once for the year may sound insane to my fellow Americans, but I'm just extrapolating-for-the-worse (because Rowlingverse) from the (discontinued) British Assizes system. Be it noted that a system where prisoners are expected to languish for up to a year in gaol would make it easier for a prisoner everyone _knows_ is guilty to be shuffled off to prison once the public's settled down, without ruffling their feathers up again or wasting the court's time...
> 
> Yes, James called his house that so his wife could be Lily of The Valley. I'm not apologizing: he had to be talked down from variations on The Frog Pond that tried and failed to reference deer (because a watery Lily would be hot, see. 9.9).
> 
> Dudley was born on Monday the 23rd according to the wikia; I'm allowing time for snail-mail. If you know that the British weekday postal service in 1980 worked at a reliably different pace than that, fill me in, will not harm the plot. ^.^ I only gave the specific date because, hey, for this chapter's event we've got one!
> 
>  **Credit** : The No James Isn't On The Dole And His Fortune Really Is Mostly Solid Gold/Cars v. Brooms incident with James and Vernon Dursley is pseudo-canon, by which I mean something JKR put up on Pottermore. I don't follow Pottermore or consider myself obliged to abide by what she said there or in interviews, but I'm not gonna shun a gem if I stumble across it and it makes sense and/or is fun. :D


	34. #12 Grimmauld Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Voldemort has taken liberties with Black property, and the family never liked him in the first place. Severus is hypnotic, (black)bird-brained, and slythe, but not omniscient.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : ...No. ;p
> 
>  **Note** : Two chapters today, because the second one would be ill-advised to try and stand alone.

"Thank-you-Dobby-you-may-go," Regulus said, his voice shrill even to his own ears. Dobby wasn't even sort-of-his-by-proxy since Grandfather had given him to Narcissa and Lucius, but he still belonged to a Black; he could still hear Regulus calling him. And elves helped family out the same as anyone else would, if it didn't go against their orders. Reggie would count himself lucky if all Kreacher needed was help.

"Regulus, this _will not do,_ " he heard the cobra press at him sternly, but he didn't look up. "I can't be hauled out of the lab every other week. Narcissa keeps owling with 'crises' that mostly turn out to be gas, and if I have to explain to _both_ of you about—"

He must have meant it, too, because he obviously could clearly see that Regulus had a sweaty, moaning house elf in his lap. "All right, I'm sorry, Naj," he interrupted, as humbly as he could manage when he felt this frantic. "But will you please—!"

There was a dangerous pause, but then he heard a sigh and a rustle. "What happened?" Severus asked in a resigned tone, from closer to Reg's level.

"I don't know, I don't _know,_ " he said, hating the way his voice caught. But Kreacher had tucked him into bed more often than his own mother had. "He said—"

"Who said?"

" _Him,_ Spike!" Reg said, looking at him finally, exasperated by this unusual stupidity.

"Quiet," Severus ordered, his voice soft but very firm. Reg gulped, and swallowed his voice down. Strong, calloused fingers settled over the sides of his face, holding him tightly in place—too tightly to move, but not hard enough to hurt. Severus smelled very odd, come fresh from his lab. "Look at me."

Reg dragged his eyes up to meet Severus's. He felt himself settling gently into a pool of ink, the cool dark flowing soothingly through his blood. He swallowed again, his hands starting to shake in relief as the calm swept through him.

Just like it had when that disgusting upper-former had gone after Gildy and he hadn't known what to do, and when Siri had been getting himself thrown out of the family, and then when he'd gone and left Reggie in over his head, suddenly appointed to Be An Authority without making a laughingstock of authority or himself and needing to study for his OWLs and learn fifteen years' worth of Siri's job at the same time, and when Bella had swooped in and crowed so fondly and eagerly about what she expected from him.

There were only a few things Severus was good for if you needed actual help, if you needed something done for you, and Reg had gold and Kreacher and his own library and wand for that everything like that. When Reg needed to remember how to stand up, though, or Evan asked him to pretend he did, Spike would stop cold in the middle of a panic attack to be steady for him. Sometimes Reggie wasn't sure how he felt about that; he'd only been eleven for the first few weeks they'd known each other, spent nearly three months every year being Severus's age and six being Evan's. He knew how he felt about it today.

"Breathe," his friend said. "The elf is stable. Breathe down into your stomach. Through the floor. Into the earth. Breathe out, through your feet, right through to Australia. Breathe it back. Smell that rankness? That's a kangaroo. They don't wash much. Regulus: _you have time_."

Something loosened in his chest, and a tremulous smile slipped past his panic. "Name your arms," he quoted. "'Spike.' Please, can you…"

"We'll see," Spike cautioned, brushing Reg's hair back until his hand was cupping Reg's nape, the other dropping to Reg's shoulder. "But if you start hyperventilating again, I'll do what the elf wants, not you. So _calm down_."

Reg managed another shaky smile, and let his forehead drop to press against Severus's for a few long breaths. "Okay," he said, almost noiselessly. "Okay."

"Good kitty," Severus said, sarcastic and acidic enough to stiffen anyone's spine, and squeezed the back of Reg's neck comfortingly before letting him go. "Now. Try again. What happened?"

"He called me," Reg said, giving the pronoun enough extra emphasis this time that Severus couldn't help but understand him. "He said he needed an elf, one that was completely reliable, and since everyone gets nervous and puts on their best show for Mother and Father he thought I'd probably know whose elf that was."

"So of _course_ you thought of Kreacher," Spike filled in dryly.

Since his sarcasm obviously had everything to do with the The Elf Daily Redefines Hackneyed Pedestrian Bourgois Garish Chintzy Vulgarity, Which Possibly Did Not Exist Before He Invented It/The Halfblood Spits On His Heritage And Is, Incidentally, Also Completely Barking, Master, Stay Away From Him It Might Be Contagious recipes war, Reg ignored it. Nodding, "I told Kreacher to do whatever he asked for and come back, and… and he came back like this," he finished, his voice splintering again.

"I swear on the Serpent, if you crack up on me I will treat you and leave the elf to writhe," Severus said levelly. Reg didn't believe him for a minute (about the last bit, at least), but he nodded convulsively and worked at breathing again. Kreacher would probably gang up on him with Severus, even in this state, and he might not have that kind of time.

"Good. That's all you know?" Reg nodded, and Spike asked, "Kreacher, can you speak?"

"Kreacher can speak," the elf got out, his teeth chattering.

Reg nearly burst into tears. His elf's strong, deep voice, the voice that made Spike's sound so much like home, had been withered into something like a bullfrog's croak.

"Good," Severus said. He'd winced, too, but then he'd drawn his cold assessing face over himself. "Kreacher, it's your master's desire for you to recover. If you're to satisfy him, you must tell me exactly what happened to you. You can't obey him in this without help, and I can't give it unless I know precisely what has brought you to this state."

"Yes," Regulus said, firmly, making it an order. "Do what he says, Kreacher, unless I say otherwise."

The cobra raised a cool eyebrow at this undermining. Obviously Kreacher would stop obeying Severus instantly if Regulus told him to. Had it really been necessary, his eyes asked, to weaken the message that Severus was doing the orchestrating here? To make it more likely that Kreacher would get contentious with the mudblood he was so used to arguing with and complaining about?

Regulus flicked an expressive look down at his shivering-wet elf before looking steadily back at Severus. Look what had happened the last time he'd left Kreacher on his own with that order! Reg wouldn't let his elf think for a moment he'd be outside the reach of Black protection again. Even if Reg knew Spike would never hurt him

—unless you counted that incident with the shortcake and the mint-and-thyme balsamic-pickled strawberries, which Reg knew had been purely for the sake of driving the elf insane even if it _had_ all turned out brain-bendingly more palatable than it should have been—

—Kreacher didn't know Spike like he did. What he did know was that his perfect obedience had just been abused, and he was still suffering for it.

Severus gave him an annoyed and resigned _I take your point_ sort of nod, and they helped Kreacher sit up together. "Tell me everything," Severus said, holding Kreacher's eyes. "Leave out no detail."

They listened together to the strangest tale Reg had ever heard outside a book. Caves and blood. Lockets that felt like death and pedestals that felt like summer noonlight on the heart in the cool cavern air, marbled hands in an underground sea. Translucent crystal basins of glowing green potion that tasted like burnt sugar and ash and gave terrible visions.

"Can't he have some tea and honey?" he'd pleaded, the shreds of Kreacher's voice shredding him. But Spike had said no, only water until he knew whether there might be interactions to consider. Tea had active flavonoids, he said, which didn't sound to Regulus like a real word, and honey was powerful, and how it was powerful depended on the pollen, and no one paid attention to that when they bought—

"All right, then, he can't," Regulus said hastily, and conjured Kreacher a cup of water.

"Glowing green," Severus repeated, half an echo and half asking to have it confirmed. "Tasted like scorched caramel and ash?"

"B-burnt sugar," Kreacher hiccoughed.

"...We'll explore that distinction later.  Describe it as though it were a wine," Severus ordered.

Even through his anxiety, Regulus had to smile when Kreacher rallied a little. When he and Sirius had been growing up, it had been Kreacher's responsibility to make sure they had at least enough of a palate to keep from embarrassing themselves.* The sudden authority in the elf's wrecked voice as he talked about the potion's legs and nose and mouth-feel was so reassuring he could almost let it be funny. Now that neither of the two most pragmatically competent people he knew were panicking, everything would be all right.

"What was it?" he asked when Kreacher was done.

Severus looked thoughtful for a while, the old, familiar, searching-his-memory expression, his eyes cast up and to the right. Finally, he replied, bright-eyed, "No idea."

"What!?" Regulus squawked.

Severus shrugged, unmoved, and said, "I've never heard of anything like it."

"You don't have to sound so ruddy _interested_!" he nearly yelled, incensed.

Raising an eyebrow at him, Severus said, "Thank your stars I _am_ the sort of person intrigued by such things. And tell your library's retrieval spell to obey me. And stop shrieking; I'd like to think there's _one_ Black immune to hysterical fits."

"—Oh." He blinked, remembered to breathe again. "Er, sorry. Right. Will Kreacher by all right while I fix the permissions?"

"I think so," Severus said judiciously, "but let's double-check." He took out his wand and ran it slowly over Kreacher's small, huddled form. "You know," he said absently, "I think it was a dose meant for a human, whatever it was. The ornamentation on that ferry sounds like the sort of thing our Lord would do, all right, but a rough-hewn basin that might have been rock salt? No. Not a Flight of Death's style. Just look at the masks. Too down-to-earth for you airy-fiery pureblood lot, anyway, although I suppose if he doesn't want anyone to find it ever… But a watery cavern that opens to blood, not wands? No, I don't think so. He's blood-sensitive."

Reg started. What—why would the Dark Lord— no, of course not. Surely not. Severus must have meant something else… but he _absolutely_ could not have meant the Dark Lord was squeamish! And coming from _Spike_ , who'd been sensitive about his blood himself, until he'd proved his magic (and willingness to learn to behave (even if he didn't always choose to)) to absolutely everyone's cowering satisfaction…

After it had been proven to _her_ satisfaction, back in Reggie's first year, Cissy had developed the theory that Spike's birthday and magic combined meant Mrs. Snape must have leapt that Beltane bonfire with someone more suitable than her husband. Everyone could tell the man was dreadful even for a muggle, anyway, from the way Spike avoided talking about him with blank eyes rather than defensive ire.

It was the only time anyone had ever seen him (or, actually, anyone but Sirius and Bella) lose his temper with Narcissa, and he'd probably only survived because she'd secretly suspected she deserved it _._ Regulus had felt at the time like he might not survive, himself, it had felt so much like being trapped between Mother and Sirius.

Happily, Gildy had walked in after five high-decibel minutes that had felt to Reg like twenty paralyzed hours. His complete inability to not make everything all about him had led him to jump up on a table and commentate with relish.

He'd ended up blind, mute, and boil-covered, of course. And he'd had to mend his shoes where his toenails had shot through them, wound around his ankles, and tripped him off the table, jamming his wrist and giving his head a solid thumping as he fell. However, the perfect synchronization of their contribution to his not-actually-noble sacrifice had dissolved the combatants into shaky giggles on each other's shoulders. And so Reg, out of fervent, weak-kneed gratitude, had taken his idiot roommate to the Hospital wing and been the first to give him the petting he was always so incompetently scrambling after. Well, the first other than the aforesaid disgusting upper-former, but that was a completely different kind of petting and _didn't count._

Once he and Narcissa had stopped shrieking at each other in the common room like fishwives and Narcissa had decided they were now friends and later realized who his mother's people were, Spike had developed a rather pawky (or possibly a better word would be deranged) sense of humor about the whole business. All his notes to her and even some of his books had been signed with escalating ridiculousness. By the end, it had reached practically Gildylocks levels. He'd started spouting Asian and Aristotalian elemental theory at every opportunity, too, just to make her stamp her foot and go _Oooh!_ in laughing vexation.

Maybe to defuse the M-word, too, a bit. But mostly, Reg was sure, it had been to slyboots at Cissy.

That had stopped by the time they started their NEWT studies, though; Reg supposed even Spike hadn't had the energy to poke people during that. He certainly had seemed chronically exhausted during Reg's OWL year. Wound up, white-eyed, and jumpy even for Severus, too, which couldn't have helped. Not unexpectedly: the end of his own OWL year had been…

Reg really couldn't blame his parents for how disgusted with Siri they were. It was hideous and terrifying, world-shaking, that they'd decided they had to cut his brother out of themselves, that they _could and had,_ but he could understand how upset they'd been. Siri and his friends had moved from mean to criminal that year. Only being young and well-protected and picking a victim with no strong family able to demand justice had kept them out of real trouble, and Sirius had shown no indication that he recognized he'd done anything wrong, or was willing to be tamed.

That didn't mean anything, Reg knew. Sirius was Sirius: he might have been in silent guilty agonies, for all he'd let on to anyone else. He had been subdued at school, _in public,_ which spoke volumes. But he and Mother didn't understand each other, they just screamed themselves purple and hoarse. She shrieked, so he shrieked back, and he had no reasonable defense but wouldn't admit he'd been wrong (because he just didn't do that, which you'd think she would have known because she didn't, either), so she decided he was unsalvageable.

Reg didn't know what reasonable defense there could have been. It had been indefensible. Although Severus had pulled himself together, and _slammed_ the House together, and bulled ahead coldly with his head high, it had absolutely gutted him. Goodbye Spike, hello, Naja. Things he would normally have thought were funny had just gotten flat, edgy, disinterested looks, and he'd been wearily unimpressed or viciously impatient where he'd usually have been patiently amused or even glintingly wicked. Only the looming terror of failing his OWLs had forced Reg to keep asking him to flay Reg's poor, innocent first drafts alive.

That and inexplicably unrelenting pressure from Evan, who seemed to have reacted by getting a personality transplant from some uncommonly enigmatic, possessive, and vicious sphinx over the summer (probably not literally; he'd spent most of it in France). It had been an _awful_ year. Reg had just been daring to hope the next one would be better when Slughorn had called Severus and all the actual prefects together and warned them who the Head Girl and Boy would be in September.

The common room had probably been due for redecorating anyway.

And the next year had been better, although most of Reg's year had sworn a solemn pact to painlessly mercy-kill any of their number who persisted in behaving, once warned, the way Lucius and Cissy had in Hogsmeade and Evan had in the common room (Severus hadn't been appalling himself, but had tolerated it almost without serious complaint, which was really bad enough, coming from him). Gildy had opted out, calling them all soulless philistines, and so had Bast Lestrange, noting that you never knew what kind of an act would be useful.

Reg caught himself. Trying to avoid thinking about Spike's unspeakably dangerous implication was only natural, was even advisable. Doing it this way wasn't fair to Kreacher. It didn't live up to Reg's liege-duty.

Spike's mouth was still running on automatic, the way it always did when he was flying two thought brooms at once, as though Reg was Narcissa and might lean over and ask some illuminating question at any moment. When it came to trusting that a question of his might be illuminating instead of stupid or annoyingly distracting, Reg frankly did not have Narcissa's stones.

"Sounds like witches' hallows to me," Severus mused on. "It may have hit him harder than intended, what with being smaller than human _and_ male, or even some interaction with elf-magic… Would be interesting to know whether the cave opens for muggles; might give us an idea how old it is, I understand druids were almost exclusively wizards, but— Hullo…"

"What?" Reg demanded, on tenterhooks.

"There's something about the anahata-puri…"

"The _who?_ "

"Heart chakra, Reg, look at an atlas sometime, other countries exist, they have fascinating magic, some of them, really usefu— _Oh,_ yes. Blown open, but not blasted. Flooded, more like. Let me look at the meridians… _a_ -ha, there we are."

He peered between Kreacher and his wand for another few moments that felt like forever, frowning and occasionally making quiet noises that didn't sound like English, Greek, or Latin. Reg hadn't taken Runes. Eventually, he sat back on his heels, putting his wand away. "I'll still want to look in your library, if I may," he said, "but I think… I don't think it was a poison."

"Then—" Reg started, his heart pounding.

"Shut up, please, I'm thinking." He glared narrowly into thin air for what felt to Regulus like aeons. "Elves," he muttered. "Don't think like people. Feudal times a thousand. Think like a slave. No, Jeeves. No—Alfred." He made a face, and glared at the floor some more while Regulus tried to think whether he knew any Als or Freds or Alfies or Frodos, because he certainly couldn't think of any Aelfreds proper, or work out what jarveys might have to do with anything.

Finally, with a shudder, Spike looked up, looking like he'd tasted something terrible. "Kreacher," he said. "You're still under orders to obey me."

"Kreacher obeys Master Regulus's order to listen to Master Lunatic Halfblood," Kreacher agreed warily.

"That'll do, you pigheaded, hidebound piece of horsenettle," Severus returned, perfectly agreeably. He must have misunderstood Reggie's swallowed snort, because he added, "Regulus, don't interfere. Kreacher, you said you saw terrible things when you drank. How many of them were about… about Regulus's brother?"

Reg and Kreacher both stared at him. But where Reg stared in surprise, Kreacher's face had a dull, glassy, look of facing the inevitable.

"Ah." Spike nodded, a sharp, quick little motion. "Kreacher… you know something Master Regulus is too kind to know, don't you. You know something your master and mistress are too sad to see clearly."

Astonished, Regulus watched fat tears well up slowly in Kreacher's snitch-sized, bloodshot eyes.

"Kreacher," Severus said, very gently, "granted that you were working with shoddy material, but you still failed, didn't you. You've hated him because he made you fail, but the failure was yours." Kreacher gave a tiny, tiny, convulsive nod. "Kreacher… isn't it your duty to—"

He was cut off as Kreacher gave a wail that shook the whole house and flung himself back onto Regulus's knees. Things tumbled and clattered off of shelves with the force of his sobs.

It was like standing under a tsunami, but through the shock of it Regulus caught phrases like, _bad, bad, bad_ , and _Master Sirius_ and _Kreacher could not teach_ and _lost, lost,_ and _Mistress's heir gone to the filth_ and _Master so sad, Master Regulus so sad, Mistress so angry_ and over and over again, _failed, failed, failed you, Master…_

With stunned effort, Regulus made himself look at Severus, who was looking grave and sad. "You have to punish him," he said. "You'll have to really punish him. It's the greatest regret of his life, and it's been shoved up inside his eyes. He won't be healed until he's done with it. He's an elf; he won't feel it's over until he's been punished enough, and this was bad, Reggie. You may think it's nonsense to blame him, but whatever you think, _he knows_ it was bad, and _he knows_ it was his fault."

In a shaky voice, his hands fallen over Kreacher's thin, heaving back, Regulus asked, "What… what was it? That, that drink?"

Severus turned a palm up in a shrug. "As far as I can tell, and for lack of a better word… remorse. All the guilt he'd blocked away, all the shame he'd blamed on someone else. Everything he'd never let himself regret. Right down his throat, filling his heart till he choked.

"I'd have said despair, but it looks like it was meant to be healing," he went on somberly, "I could see it being fatal, though. If someone's heart was too weak physically, or too hard, too closed, too prideful to accept it. Certainly indirectly, if they were open to the guilt but not the cleansing. That's why you _have_ to punish him, Reg, so hard he can _believe_ he's atoned and earned forgiveness.  Without doubt."

Reg looked down at Kreacher, smoothing the pillowcase over the birdlike shoulderblades, sunk in aching for him. And then he felt a sudden surge of sympathy with Siri's oft-expressed desire to flatten the bloody-damned hard-hearted swot's nose.

Because what Severus said next, reflective and _hugely_ inappropriately chipper, was, "Also, he's dangerously dehydrated; we should get him that tea. Fascinating, when you think about it. You will let me at your library, Reggie, won't you? I have _got_ to work out how it's done."

"You know, Severus," he said angrily, "sometimes you are the _most insensitive_ —"

"That's as may be," Spike cut him off, more soberly. "But think, Reg. Do you understand what Kreacher told you, really? What it means, what it was?"

"No, but—"

"Nor I. Did you pick up that the Dark Lord left him to die?"

Regulus closed his mouth, with a snap, as Kreacher curled more tightly in his lap. He hadn't.

"That, if we assume he does as he means to do, he _meant_ Kreacher to die?"

Regulus said nothing. Not only words but thoughts failed him.

"This was important enough to him that he risked good relations with your whole family to keep it secret, Reggie. And those relations are already on thin ice. You shouldn't ask me how, but he's done Narcissa a very serious disservice and hurt her sister's feelings. And now he throws your elf's life away? Even if he just sees elves as property, he's got to know you'd take that as an insult at the very least. Reg, this was _that_ important, and we don't know what it was. We do not understand one single piece of it, not for sure, not even close. I have _got_ ," he repeated, no longer Charlie Ravenchirp, "to work out how it was done. And _you_ have got," he added, positively grim, "to take ill with grief—and start working a hell of a lot harder at not thinking about pink elephants."

* * *

* Sirius, of course, had decided he only liked drinks that were brown. This had not gotten him out of lessons, but had forced Kreacher to also become an expert in whiskey and beer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Credits** : It was probably _Living Waters_ by J. Odel at Red Hen and/or something(s) or other by Whitehound that convinced me Albus had it completely up his jumper about the 'crude' and by-implication dark magic of the cave and discussed the symbology. Would not be surprised if they'd both talked about it, but it's been a long time, my memory is vague, I'm not working directly from source and I'm quite sure nothing got incorporated whole. I recommend reading both their ouvres until you get there. No need to stop reading to come let me know which it was, I know you'll want to keep going. ;)
> 
> Yes, Severus is referring to the Alfred you think he is (he's never bought any comics himself, mind, but that's not the only way to be exposed...) and if you don't know P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster series, either on paper or through Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry... well, not everyone loves them and you don't want to overdose, but ♥.


	35. Linden Grove, Canterbury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Granddad is inclined, on balance, to go with the flow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : Arcturus Black is an old dude, and, unlike Albus and Horace, mostly only talks to other relatively old dudes.
> 
> (dodges plasma strike and does not promise never again to call venerable wizards dudes)
> 
> (because Albus :D)

_"Cludo incantatum._ "

Art turned at the whisper, as quickly could in his desk chair, but realized at once he was wearing a blindfold. He tore it off, and was reassured that it came easily.

No one else was in his study, which was how things had been a moment ago. Or, rather, he realized with a look at the clock, an hour ago. New, though, was the envelope in front of him, sealed with one of his own secrecy spells and with his name on it. The message inside it, though, was addressed to his heir apparent, his only surviving son. It read:

(¯`·._.·(¯`·._.· (O) ·._.·´¯)·._.·´¯)

My dear Orion,

It has come to my attention that, incredible as it may seem, a certain schoolfellow of yours (you will recall the one I warned you against in your youth, having reviewed evidence which most strongly implicated him in the death of his muggle father) has made a murderous attempt upon your house-elf. Should he learn it has not succeeded, I am convinced that his not inconsiderable resources would be bent in animus upon the family, in particular endangering the children. Believing my source sound and a sincere family ally, I have agreed to expunge the memory of this ally's identity and our meeting, and will have done so by the time you read this.

You could not be blamed for rendering the matter moot, as the odious halfblood has grown to be no small power in the land and may not stay a silent one forever. Nonetheless, I would counsel against it. The elf has, by all accounts, behaved with perfect loyalty and propriety. As he has no issue to inherit his retainership, you would have to replace him with an unknown quantity. More, I am not yet convinced that my young namesake is as yet so mature as to easily do without the caregiver of his childhood—nor so secure in his duties as heir presumptive that it would be wise to deprive him of so experienced a helper.

If you will take your father's advice, then pull up the drawbridge, fill the moat with afancs and dobhar-chú, keep the elf's survival quiet, and seek to know no more than you must. Your lady wife (to whom, of course, my best regards) may perhaps be reconciled to a semi-seclusion by her own memories of the impertinent whelp's presumption at a time when he was weaker than he is today.

      Your loving father,  
Arcturus Black

(¯`·._.·(¯`·._.· (O) ·._.·´¯)·._.·´¯)

Art read this note again, one eyebrow up. It certainly was his handwriting. The hand looked unforced and the voice was his own, not some dictated message from this 'source,' whoever he was. And no one outside the family could have known to make him, through the mention of the afanc, include the Arthurian reference that told him, as it would Orion, that he'd been the writer, a stronger assurance even than his signature or seal.

He folded it up and called for his youngest, Lucretia, who'd come to live with him in his old age. At his request, she checked him for traces of imperius or other compelling or confusing spells. All she found was an unknown memory charm, as his own writing had implied she would.

Art wasn't really surprised at this evidence that he'd been convinced without magic, and not just because it had been left to his unenchanted self to decide whether to send the letter. Trying to kill an elf was unusually stupid and perverted even for an ignorant mudblood, yes. But there was wasn't much he would have put past Riddle, the smooth-talking little monster. If only they'd had enough proof, forty years ago, to put him away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : It's easier to pull wool over a wolf's eyes when it's in sheep's clothing, and snakes eat toads for breakfast.


	36. Hallway/Wolfsbane Lab, St. Mungo's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lies, damned lies, and occlumency. When his lab's funding is threatened, Severus shows what he's made of, discomfiting everyone but his closest friends. They? Are rightly terrified.
> 
> Or: It's easier to pull wool over a wolf's eyes when it's in sheep's clothing, and snakes eat toads for breakfast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : Long. _Slytherin_. Slytherins with competence kinks. Ministry toadies (sorry). Ruminations on pregnancy from a distinctly non-maternal perspective. The intersection of dark arts and mind magic is not what the Ministry thinks. Do not give Severus red ink if you value your SOOOOUUUUL. (((O.O)))

Evan bounced off someone ridiculously tall. Not at all sure he had time for normal civility, he tried to just shoulder past with a curt word of apology, but the mild voice of his former fellow-prefect made him stop with a sigh. "Rosier, isn't it? Everything all right?"

"Oh, Lupin, I do not have time for you," he groaned. Later he would realize it had been perfect iambic pentameter, tell Spike he was taking over the choice of their bedtime reading, and be more or less patted on the head. At the moment, he was barely noticing large, moving objects directly in front of him.

"What's the matter?" Lupin asked in (still-mild, the skunk) alarm.

He had, Evan recalled, been relatively free of House prejudice, for a Gryff, and had responsibly done all his prefectural work of the sort one could check off a list. One could only blame him so much for having the cowardly good sense not to challenge his bullying bastards of mates.

Evan wasn't guiltless of delegating his duties himself. No, he was guiltless. When work was done willingly, by the best person to do it, better than it had been done in institutional memory, the person in charge got to feel, rather than guilty, proud. Evans hadn't been nearly as effective at what Lupin avoided as Spike and Narcissa had been at what Evan had left for them, though.

Besides, in Ev's case, it hadn't been so much him avoiding his job, as, well, Slytherin prefects traditionally didn't do very much in any active sense, and the lower years knew better than to make them. That was the whole point, really; everyone knew that if you distracted frazzled prefects from their OWL and NEWT studies or pulled them away from their dates, you were _for it_.

Besides. Severus wasn't actually half Muggle, he was half wizard and half mother hen. He hadn't been able to help being the most zealous prefect they'd had at _least_ since Malfoy, with or without a badge. He fussed about Evan being lazy and leaving work undone for him to do, but really? That was just Spike.

And it was about the same with Evans, Ev had observed. She was just as much of a busybody, found it just as impossible to hold back from taking care of people. She would probably have done twice as much work as Lupin even if he'd been doing everything he was supposed to.

But he hadn't been. Unlike Spike, who scolded indiscriminately, in a knee-jerk sort of way and as a matter of personal style, she'd been _actually angry_ about it, had emphatically not volunteered. Evan didn't like her; she'd made Severus miserable for years; but he'd been on her side on that front. In spades.

Even ordinary prefect work was tedious and a distraction from OWL and NEWT revision, but she hadn't had ordinary prefect work. She and Lupin had been the only real shot Hogwarts had had, in their fifth year, at keeping Lupin's friends off Severus's neck. And she'd still been Severus's friend that year, or thought she was. Was still trying to be, at least, in her stiff-necked, demanding, infantile way. And Lupin had sat on his hands and stared at his feet while his friends got worse and worse until the sky cracked open, left Severus skinned and shaking for _seasons,_ left Sirius out in the cold.

Lupin clearly didn't understand that it was mostly Evan, rather than Slytherin as a whole, who'd been responsible for most of his thuggish group's inability to land a job. The whole House had helped make sure all of Wizarding Britain and much of Europe knew what they were like, yes. It had been Ev's intention, though: a two-year plan formed whole and cold and set into motion before Spike had even woken up after the horror under the beech tree, while Evan's vision was still so clouded by scarlet and Black he wasn't having anything that could have been called an actual thought.

Lupin didn't have any way to know that, as far as Evan was aware. And Evan had so-very-kindly given him a nudge towards self-employment, because, unfortunately, the least guilty of the bunch (although they were all guilty) had been the only one who couldn't have stayed alive after school without an income. It was working out well enough for them. Apparently Marauders' Moon products were almost as popular with the Magical Law Enforcement office as they were at Zonko's.

Evan had nothing to feel either ashamed or smug about. He'd been after justice and _oh Salazar, keep these people and their mostly-excellent CVs out of my government,_ not revenge.

Maybe a little smug. It had been a delicate line to walk, cutting them out of future power without stirring up a new War of the (Black) Roses.

Besides, if the 'Marauders' had grown up and cut it out, people would have noticed and passed that along, too. In justice. They mostly hadn't. They'd just gotten more discreet, (only barely, by serpentine standards), more selective. He'd told Slytherin to tell the truth.

Lupin might not have held a grudge even if he'd known what Evan's role had been: he was more self-aware than his friends and knew perfectly well he'd been a cringing, useless, hypocritical coward unworthy of his House. There was something pleasant, though, in knowing he had enough wool over his eyes to think Ev was, for a Slytherin, a decent chap who didn't actively hate him. Possibly true, actually, depending on your definitions of 'decent chap' and 'hate,' so there you were.

"I just found out they're doing a surprise inspection of Belby's lab," he said hurriedly, because Lupin was showing no inclination to get out of his way and making a scene would probably take longer, "and their grant's up for renewal soon, and—"

His jaw dropped, because Lupin had seized his arm with unexpected strength and was toting him along just where he wanted to go.

Evan had been Slytherin's only game-day Seeker until midway through his sixth year. By that point he'd gotten too tall for it, too well-developed, too NEWT-class-frazzled, and too busy with the prefect duties Spike couldn't do better. So he'd started training Reg up to replace him, as he'd always known he would unless some young genius popped up. They'd had a Seeker on the reserve team already and Reg had been playing Chaser for years, but Lockhart had in fact been incapable of spotting any glints that hadn't come from his teeth. Also of letting anyone younger try out. Even when Reg had more or less taken over for him on the pitch, Ev hadn't _officially_ given up his spot or forfeited his captaincy, he'd just switched out of the roster for most of the games. He knew who all the other players had been, even their reserves. After all, even if no one else had used the reserve players quite like Slytherin had, that didn't mean no one ever would.

That was how Ev could be sure Lupin had never been even a Gryffindor reserve. The man had a Beater's arm somehow anyway. He didn't look it; he looked like… like a lupin, actually, if less purple and fluttery. That tall, anyway, and as slim, though sleeker than Spike.

He _had_ to get Severus invested in food again. The way he forgot it existed when he was wrapped up in a project and lost his appetite under stress was nothing new, but these days thestrals were sleeker than Spike.

Outright expressions of worry or disapproval would only get Severus all worked up about Not Being _Right_ For Evan Like A (whole) Normal Person But How Dare Anyone Tell Him How (who) To Be. Ev had watched Narcissa try that and he was absolutely not going there, never never never. Hints, though, had only gotten him a faceful of relevant quotes from the stories about that barely civilized Victorian detective with the terrible hat that Spike was so starry-eyed about. These had been delivered with a happy, carefree pleasure in the thought of any commonality that had been unfairly kissable while also making Spike look about twelve and Evan want to hit something.

If this kept up, Ev was not going to be able to look Mrs. Snape in the eye. Which would probably make her less afraid of him. It simply wouldn't do.

"How did you find out?" Lupin asked. His voice, at odds with the urgency in his pace that matched Evan's own, was merely curious. Interesting, but maybe not surprising. If he was ashamed of what he'd done (and he'd seemed ashamed even at the time) he hadn't liked doing it, or hadn't liked liking it. He would have had to hide that distaste from his friends—or hid how much he didn't like it, at least. That, or the shame had been a lie _Slytherin had believed_. And, of course, that lot were all accomplished sneaks, well-practiced in lying credibly to teachers and fellow-students both.

"Amos Diggory, he works Beast Division, says his son's just done his first accidental magic, although frankly it sounded like the work of a stiff breeze, but proud papas, far be it from me. Asked me to lunch to talk about a family portrait—" He nearly stumbled. Evan wasn't a short wizard; he could meet Luke eye to eye and had a few inches on Spike. Lupin was a good half-head taller, though, and he was absolutely eating the floor up with the stretch of his legs. "What's it to you?"

"I know the family of a girl who's gone missing," Lupin said, with a hurried note that made alarm bells ring _false!_ in Evan's ears. "I've been stopping by recently, checking if she's turned up. The family's muggle; they can't get into the Alley without help. I like Ranjit, and Ming Lovegood's all right."

"Good cook, too," Evan said absently while his mind churned. "Although I wish she hadn't introduced Severus to green tea; I mean, it's nice he's found a flavor of ice cream he doesn't think is cloying, but really…"

Lupin chuckled. They fell silent, though, as they hastened down a multi-flight of sliding stairs and through the corridor leading to the lab.

They stopped just outside its door at the sound of loud voices, and Evan cursed under his breath. They were too late.

"Why, yes," a breathy little-girl's voice was saying, very sweetly. "That's why it's called a surprise inspection, Mr. Patil."

"Well, I don't know how you mean to inspect us properly if you stop all our deliveries!" Patil's voice didn't usually have much of an accent, but it got distinctly musical when he was angry. This had won him a few dates and bed-friends before his marriage, but never any arguments. "And where's your auth—"

 _"Pat_!" Evan heard his favorite irate bellow come from the depths of the lab, rapidly nearing. "Where the _hell_ are my—" It stopped.

Evan gave a huge, silent sigh of relief and levitated himself a foot off the ground, waving intently. He saw Spike, his usual work-hours wreck, lift narrowed, assessing eyes to meet his, without any change of expression. He pointed down at the petite little witch and her, ugh, awful alice-band and flippy teased hair and wrote _Authorized!_ in the air with his wand.  He made a chopping motion, too. Seeing understanding in his partner's eyes, and a sudden half-lidded explosion of furious thought, he let himself down.

"Well," he heard Spike say, sounding put-upon but resigned, "and why does the Ministry feel it necessary to interfere with my guinea pigs?"

 _Guinea pigs._ Evan very discretely air-punched. Lupin shot him the fish-eye. Ev grinned, with every single tooth. Lupin took a casual sideways step in the away direction. Ev's grin widened. Lupin visibly decided to be put-upon and tolerantly annoyed, and Evan made no bones about trying not to laugh. It was _such_ a this-is-how-I-deal-with-Sirius-maybe-it-will-work-on-his-cousin-please-oh-please-oh-please reaction.

"Are you in charge here, Mr…?"

Evan could just about taste the lightning calculation of _emphasize attractiveness or power?_ in the instant's pause before Spike replied, "Severus Snape, ma'am, I'm lead apprentice. Master Belby is out negotiating with suppliers."

"Are you really?" the light little voice asked dubiously. "And is it Master Belby's practice to allow his apprentices to come to work in such a state?"

Spike laughed. Pleasantly. Next to Evan, Lupin's jaw dropped. Evan had to fight the impulse himself. "Certainly not, Madam…?"

"Dolores Umbridge." She was on a holding pattern of slightly poisonous sweetness, like one of Mulciber's cocktails, until she knew what to make of Spike.

"Delighted," Spike said, extending a hand. "No, indeed, Madam Umbridge, none of us would think of coming to work in the same condition we usually seem to get in before leaving. There are cauldrons going all the time, you see; one gets a bit… well. Do forgive my appearance; I prefer to take the morning brewing shift. Since our replenishing coffee-pot failed…" He shrugged helplessly. "I'm afraid we haven't any space in the budget for frivolities, and I'm usually the one most awake before lunch."

Thus explaining why he was the only one looking seethed and oiled, and at the same time telling her none of the present grant's gold was unused or being misapplied. Evan wondered whether any of those implications were true; he knew the coffee-pot had been fixed without any money being spent on it—it had been an ordinary coffee-pot when they'd gotten it, in fact.

Preferring to take the morning shift at the cauldrons was definitely true. Spike would take brewing over Necessary Paperwork at _any_ time of day, if the alternative was delegation rather than procrastination. Early on, Patil had complained about not getting as much practical experience as he'd expected, so Spike had Generously Stepped Aside and sat down with a pot of red ink to proofread his reports. Since Spike had had extra time on his hands and all.

It was amazing how much like blood even the pinkest red ink looked after Spike had been correcting your work with it for a while. It went brownish. The parchment turned irregularly pus-yellow around the worst passages. Girls had asked him to use their sparkly ink in an attempt to make it more cheerful, make an essay look written-on rather than a victim of the Death of a Thousand Cuts. A mistake: glitter clotted, shimmeriness just got… sickly.

Patil's spelling was all right, but he had not, previously to this experience, seen the need to use proper English grammar in a lab report.

It wasn't his fault he'd been unprepared. He'd been ahead of them, so he'd never gotten any Sodding Snape Commentary™ himself.  He hadn't been in their House, so he'd never seen anyone stand staring at their poor mutilated work in the common room, struggling to maintain their public face. He couldn't have known.

Except that he had by that point met Spike, so never mind.

"Lovegood," Severus went on, "get yourself fume-proofed, will you, and take over for me in the stillroom while I take care of our inspectors. And you, Patil, we need those requisition forms in by three, and _all_ the charts _done_ by the end of the week."

Evan grinned again, and Lupin gave him a mystified look. He made a kissing-up face. Since Lupin didn't look enlightened, he leaned in and subvocalized, "Brainless paperwork. Punishing the one who was rude to her. Any office-rat understands. Those are things Pat always does."

"I daresay we could manage some tea for you, though, if you'd prefer to wait a moment while I tidy up," Spike offered.

"Oh, well," the inspector replied, her sweetness still sounding a bit as though she were covering distaste, but more civil than before. "If it would make you more comfortable."

"Speaking of comfort, you're welcome to sit anywhere you like. I recommend the chair by the microscope; Lovegood put a cushioning charm on it before she'd used it five minutes and it's, well, it's tolerable now."

Judging by how much he complained about that chair, she'd quickly understand what she was meant to about the luxury their lab enjoyed and what their standards of tolerable were. Or she might just be comfortable and not-offended; Lovegood was a curvy little bit of a thing and Spike was a long drink of wit-sharpening potion without any cushioning of his own. Their chairs would not be comfortable for each other. Proportions, ergonomics, vanilla and chocolate… dark, _dark_ chocolate, kissing Spike when he'd been drinking mocha…

There were tea-making noises. Evan sighed a little, and under-whispered to Lupin, "We'd better clear out before anyone turns around."

Lupin shook his head with a little smirk, and then twirled his wand around himself, as though wrapping himself in a rope. His body faded into the walls. Evan felt a tap on his head, and then a cold and runny sensation as though someone had cracked an egg on his skull.

He looked at—or, rather, through—his hands, and waved one. There was a very faint shimmer of movement in the air, but that was all. When he waved it more slowly, there wasn't even that. "Nice," he said under his breath, storing up all the information he had about the charm for later research. There were distinct advantages to looking indolently harmless: people spoke freely, and sometimes even tried to impress you. If you were possible but not easy to impress, sometimes they'd show you their good tricks _more than once_.

They (or, at least, he) followed the inspector inside the lab, careful not to move quickly or abruptly. Evan also followed Spike into the WC when he left the inspector alone under Pat's resentfully silenced eye.

Evan watched Severus freshen his clothes, cleaning his face, hands, and hair with all the grim efficiency of someone who'd grown up washing under a pump. He rolled his eyes when Spike _of course_ used the same bar of fume-protectant laced soap for all three. When he turned towards the door, Evan turned the water back on, whispered, "Lance, Naj," and touched his wrist before leaning in for an invisible kiss.

Severus's hand came up unhesitatingly into his hair after the first moment of surprise, and the other wrapped around his back, pulling him in tight. "Came to warn me?" he whispered back, warm. "When'd you learn a chameleon spell?"

"Haven't learned it yet, tell you later. Hold still," Evan told him, stepping back, and pulled the currently-invisible ribbon out of his own hair. He wrapped Spike's back into a short, stubby mariner's club, the ribbon extending it long enough to be pulled back. That would only last until it was taken out, which was a pity. Once Evan took his hands off it, the ribbon turned black again.

"Neater," Evan allowed, enjoying the excuse to forbid Spike his favorite hiding place and make him show off his cheekbones and jaw. No one had a throat like Spike (it had to be admitted that when he _hadn't eaten for practically a month_ no one had an adam's apple like him, either, but he'd rather gleefully gone ahead with his teenaged plan to wear cravats, so it didn't show much), and in his less possessive moods Ev felt those bedraggled black curtains were practically criminal. Spike should be painted in black-swan masquerade garb, or pretending to swoon with a vampire at his throat, plunging a stake with a cross handle and dripping holy water into its back.

Besides, even clean and without his fume-repellant, his hair looked, when it was down, as though he just wasn't making an effort. Which was true, because the amount of effort it took before anyone could see an effect was unreasonable for everyday. Even Narcissa had given up. It was just stubbornly listless, when it wasn't frazzled, in a way that hadn't appealed even to Evan until he'd found out that limp meant fine meant _soft_. Now he didn't understand how Spike could like his, although he was pleased enough with the way it looked and had caught Lockhart failing to break into his trunk for nonexistent hair potions several times at school. Spike had assured him, though, with deep amusement, that 'coarse' was not at all the word he himself would use, and if he had a deep yearning to be swept over by a bodiless texture he would hand Evan a silk handkerchief (at which point they had of course stopped cold, looked at each other, and scrambled to collect every handkerchief, cravat, tie, napkin, scarf, and hand towel in the flat).

"More dashing," he smiled into Spike's ear, and kissed behind it. "Your serpent eats toads, I believe? Leave no bones, Naj."

"Absurd," Spike whispered back, and the memory of what had last followed that word made Evan badly, badly want not to let him out. "Are there any worth speaking of that don't?" He turned with his eyes closed, presumably so they wouldn't confuse him while he gave Evan one more lingering kiss. Then he squared his shoulders, turned the water off, and strode for the door.

He stopped himself before he reached it, after only three steps, and finished leaving at a still efficient but much more relaxed clip. Evan followed him much more slowly and carefully. He looked forward to telling Narcissa that their long afternoons of posture practice, so horrible and grueling they'd had to make it a regular practice to go for gallops on Salisbury Plain afterwards to siphon off some of everyone's violently frustrated hysteria, hadn't gone to waste.

"My apologies for the delay," Severus said, sounding, incredibly, a little embarrassed. "The particles do rather stick."

"It seems a most unpleasant place to work, Mr. Snape," said the breathy little voice, curious. Evan, in the lab proper now, was surprised to see what she looked like from the front: trim enough, but stocky and quite top-heavy. Her mouth looked like it might have taken a size-altering hex at some point and not quite come back to normal; her lips were slit too long to look quite natural. It made them look almost frog-like, although he could see that at a normal length they would merely have been on the thin side of ordinary.

He wondered, too, if she had some non-European ancestry, or if the way her face was broad had been an effect of the same curse. The broadness didn't look quite Irish, Scots, or Germanic, and her eyes bulged more than Mingyue's, whose other features harmonized them.

He couldn't remember having more fun with any painting than the one he'd done for the Lovegoods' wedding. The two of them were good-looking in such different ways that he'd been unable to resist hiding yin-yangs everywhere. They were both interesting conversationalists, too, provided you didn't take Xeno seriously and let his insanity drive you up a wall.

"R&D brewing is often like that, Madam Umbridge," Severus assured her in a shrugging tone. He, of course, was also insane, and regularly drove everyone up all the walls. It was one of Ev's favorite spectator sports. "There isn't much to be done about it, with most potions projects. Once a recipe is perfected one can often use a bubble-head charm, but while it's still in development it's essential to be able to smell what one's doing."

"How irksome. Now, let me see…" there was a shuffle of paper. "My records show that all three of Belby's apprentices have at least seven NEWT passes. And you have… yes, indeed." She looked at him: mildly impressed, rather suspicious, and deeply censorious. "Surely you could have found some other work, Mr. Snape?" she asked with sweet reproach.

"Well, yes," Spike said, sounding surprised, leaning on the counter as he reheated the teapot in his hands.

Evan went a little squishy over that, very privately, because anyone else would have been doing it to show off his wandless magic, or out of thoughtless habit, but not his partner. Severus, Evan knew for a certainty, was just too much of a control freak to leave the kettle's temperature to a heat source he couldn't monitor by feel and control without even thinking about it. And he would have considered that it would have looked like showing off, too, and gotten embarrassed about it, and then gone ahead anyway because of seeing that this desk-despot would like him showing off for her and would react badly to bad tea (even though nobody else noticed half the 'faults' that made tea 'bad' to Severus).

That was Ev's Spike, too busy absently knocking everyone's socks off while fretting to notice he had something to boast about. That was Severus, who'd decided all on his own that Evan was useful and not-awful, before they were even speaking, who'd yanked Evan in from the cold and sat on him, glowering menacingly, until he thawed.

"Of course," Severus went on regretfully, "all the other offers that would have given me work _this_ challenging would have meant leaving Britain. It's a pity my Head of House didn't tell me he was sending my CV out; I could have saved him a few owls."

Evan raised an eyebrow, his lips pursing: he hadn't heard of any such offers. If Spike had turned down the chance to get the hell out of British politics on the assumption that Ev wouldn't have jumped at the excuse to move with him, they were going to have a prolonged conversation.

If Spike had turned down the chance to get out of 'politics,' _period_ , they were going to have a prolonged conversation.

He wondered where Lupin had got to.

"Still," the witch persisted with a distasteful little twitter, "coming to work for werewolves…"

"For them?" Spike shrugged, also distasteful. "Hardly, Madam Umbridge. I'll grant you that they'll likely feel a benefit if we're successful, but that's hardly the point, is it?"

There was a tiny flicker of movement in the air near the door, and Evan's eyes fixed on it. He didn't want to lose Lupin's location again unless he had to; the man was clearly a very effective sneak, for an oversized Gryffindor. There had definitely been something off about the way he'd explained his interest in the lab, too.

"And what would you say the point is?" she asked, taking up the quill stuck to her clipboard.

"Got to control the beasts one way or another, don't we," Spike said.

There was a head-jerky motion in that same patch of empty air. As unlike Lupin's usual easy amble as that was, Evan was surprised himself. He'd never heard Spike sound so bored and callous at the same time before. At his desk in the corner, Patil half-rose. He only sank down again when Severus turned, in the process of fetching himself a teabag, to glare steaming death at him.

"The Werewolf Registry—"

"Does well, considering its current, limited resources," Spike finished for her smoothly, with a regretful grimace (it was clearly not what she'd been going to say), "but we have every hope that our product will help to expand its function."

For the first time, the little witch looked uncertain. "I understood you were attempting to alleviate the discomfort of their transformations?" she asked sweetly.

Spike chuckled. Since it was the kind of warm chuckle that even his friends didn't usually get, sounding rather like one of Lucius's, all the hair on the back of Evan's neck stood straight up. Given how wavy his hair was, this was something of an accomplishment. "Again, Madam Umbridge, if that's a side effect of the perfected potion, fine, but it's not really the point, is it?"

"Well, then?"

"The violence _,_ " Spike explained. "As matters stand, the creatures become wholly monstrous in both body and mind every month." There was a split-second's hesitation. Evan thought probably no one else even noticed it; he recognized it as calculation. "They can be put down like the mad dogs they are, of course, but they can't be held morally accountable for what they do in that state. What we're trying to create is a potion that will allow them to keep, well," he gave an unpleasant breath of laughter, "what minds they have, whatever their shape. It might reduce the number of attacks and even if it doesn't, it would allow them to _remember_ what they've done when transformed. As no doubt you're aware, Madam Umbridge, in many cases, it's only a criminal's attempts to cover up a crime after the fact that leads to their being caught."

He'd started to say something else and then closed his mouth on it. Evan put a hand over his own mouth and bit down hard. He knew _exactly_ what Spike had wanted to say there, and he was _not_ going to laugh while invisible. It would have been: _I have references._

Fortunately, Umbridge had been looking down at the notes she was writing. "I see," she said slowly, counterpoint to the rapid scribbling of her quill. "And, as regards the Registry?"

"Well, ma'am, it's always been Professor Slughorn's belief that it's a good idea to have carrots to offer as well as sticks. If we can get it to work, even if it doesn't make the change any more comfortable for them, the potion should be attractive to any wolves who would prefer not to hurt anyone. And if there's some incentive for the beasts to come and be registered, the Ministry might have a much easier time tagging the ones who were never wizards. We don't track or trace muggles, after all. And if it does end up reducing the discomfort after all, Madam Umbridge, we can _use_ that. Even the ones who don't care about controlling themselves might come take it of their own accord, in that case."

"Why, that's an interesting point, Mr. Snape," she said in an almost friendly tone, very nearly devoid of artificial sweeteners. "You seem to have given this a great deal of thought, or is this Damocles Belby's position?"

"I couldn't say what his position is," Spike said, with an uninterested truthfulness that was entirely dishonest: he certainly couldn't tell her Belby had a granddaughter who'd managed to stay unregistered.

(Lydia had very little patience with Evan's lack of skill with a kite. He could get her to sit quietly and color while Belby and Spike talked shop over tea—if he promised to help her turn her picture into a kite when she was done. Not the most inexplicable obsession in someone who had to be locked into a cage of pain every month, so Evan tried not to find it wearing. He did wish someone with the right to put her at a risk of skinned knees would buy the wretched girl a kiddie broom.)

Severus went on, "I can tell you that often a research brewer will fix on a potion to invent purely because it seems impossible; I can't tell you how many people have tried to re-create Mithridates' Shield, for example."

"What on earth..?" she began

This, of course, was a mistake, as Evan could have told her. Severus's eyes lit up, and he began, "There was a king, reigned in the East: there, where kings will sit to feast—" Pat looked up and chimed in, and Mingyue's dreamy voice curled around theirs from under the stillroom door. They chorused,

"They get their fill before they think,  
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.  
He gathered all the springs to birth  
From the many-venomed earth:  
First a little, then to more  
He sampled all her killing store;  
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,  
Sate—"

"Sat," Pat insisted.

"SATE," Severus scowled. " _Sate_ the king when healths went round. As in _was satiated._ "

"It is, you know, Ranjit," Mingyue's smiling voice came through the stillroom door.

"Bah," opined Pat, but he started them up again. They made a mesmerizingly polyrhythmic Greek chorus, with Mingyue emphasizing every syllable she didn't nearly skip almost equally, Pat coming down hard on at least one in nearly every word, and Severus weaving around them, reeling out long, low, velvety, vaguely sinister ribbons of sound that stressed exactly what he wanted to.

"They put arsenic in his meat  
And stared, aghast, to watch him eat;  
They poured strychnine in his cup  
And shook to see him drink it up:  
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:  
 _Them_ it was their poison hurt!  
I tell the tale that I heard told:  
Mithridates, he died old."

"Seventy-one," Severus added meticulously but also rather glowily, when they'd all sighed and given the Holy Grail a moment of respectful silence. "Lost a war to Pompey Magnus. After surviving _Sulla._ Surviving a war with him and outliving him proper, I mean. Not small beer. Had to kill himself, of course; Pompey clearly did not get enough hugs as a child, complete glory and popularity addict; he would unquestionably have been centerpiece in a triumph. Most humiliating."

The woman was staring at him with her froggy eyes.

He coughed, reddening, and explained, "Mithridates' Shield is a universal antitoxin that may or may not ever have existed. R&D brewers have been trying to piece it together from Pontic and Roman scrolls for centuries. It's the sort of impossible challenge that's irresistible. And I know Master Belby's castle-in-the-air hope is to cure lycanthropy. He hopes a palliative will be merely a step in the process. We all do, of course."

"And your own interest in werewolves is?"

There was a long, long pause: the first time since he'd stopped shouting that Spike hadn't seemed completely at his ease.

"Mr. Snape?"

Evan looked at him. His hands were trembling. "I… had a… a very near escape once," he said, low, the words nearly swallowed. Evan could barely hear him; he was sure Patil couldn't. His face was turned so that no one could see it, even Evan. That was just as well, if he was lying. If he wasn't…

Without showing his face, which was more of a trick than usual with his hair back, he went on, "It was—please don't ask me to—I'd be happy to take the silver test or any you like, just… I can't t-talk about it."

The woman handed him a teacup herself, reaching up to pat his hand sympathetically. Evan was abruptly positive that at least one of her ugly rings was pure silver. "I quite understand," she said quietly, once she'd snuck a quick peek at his unblistered skin. "I knew someone myself."

Spike looked at her, raw and open as even Even rarely saw him. He pressed at her, fiercely, "Help me make it _stop_."

She gave him what couldn't, with a mouth that wide, really be called a _little_ smile, and held out her arm for him to take. "Let's go on with the inspection, Mr. Snape," she said. Her voice was sweet and breathy again, but it didn't sound so ear-wringingly fake anymore. "Do show me your facilities."

When he'd explained everything in the lab to her and taken her down to view the cages, Lupin and Evan broke Lupin's chameleon spell.

Patil, who had been staring after Spike with his jaw on the floor, jumped when he turned back and saw them. "How long have you two been here?" he demanded.

"Oh, come on, Pat, you don't think Severus could have gotten his hair that neat himself?" Evan winked.

"Hullo, Raj," Lupin said, more sheepishly. Then, evidently getting over it, he commented with a sort of lowering, unsurprised disappointment, "I didn't know he felt like that."

"Neither did I," Patil said, looking back after them, round-eyed.

"Are you two completely blind?" Evan asked, raising an incredulous eyebrow at them. "Unless I'm very much mistaken, he's just convinced one of the most stringently anti-werewolf voices on the review board that your grant should be renewed."

"How do you know Miss Umbridge?" Lupin asked, pronouncing the name as if it tasted of dungbomb.

Evan looked at him, bemused. "I don't know her. I was listening. Weren't you?"

"Yes, I was," Lupin said staunchly, scowling, "and he was saying the most awful things—"

"Yes," Evan said dreamily. "Severus is good at saying awful things. I've never known anyone like him for saying just the right wrong things to the right person at the right time. Very distracting. I've never seen him fake courtesy like that, though, certainly not at the same time. Makes you want to dive for the chocolate whipped cream and brandied blackberries, don't you think?"

"…Um," said Patil, sliding Evan a strange _I'd say that was oh-sweet-Krishna too much information but I have never in my life heard anyone complain as much about seeds in fruit as you do about blackberries and Snape gives whipped cream I-do-not-understand-you stares_ look.

As if Evan would ever tell anyone anything Spike felt private about. Pat would probably work that out once his head was clear. He and Severus might not throw each other's first names around, but they'd been in each other's pockets a long time now.

"Mm," Lupin twitched what Evan assumed he thought was perturbed agreement with Patil's _oh dear Merlin too much information_ look. Really his whole face twitched, in pieces, it was _beautiful._

"Just as well he had his face turned away for that little faux-breakdown, though," Evan went on, still dreamily, watching Lupin carefully out of the corner of his eye. Now that he had the man's mask off, had him reacting visibly… "He never has been any good at the outright lie."

And there it was: not just a flash but a spasm of guilt, barely contained. Lupin got control of himself quickly (not quickly enough), and asked slowly, "So you think he was…"

"Oh, I _know_ he was," Evan said, smiling and dispensing with the faraway expression, not too fast. "'If that's a side effect oh well fine,' my _eye_. He frets over those side effects the lab hasn't stripped out of the potion yet like all the little werelets were his fuzzy, fuzzy babies."

"That's what I _thought_ ," Patil said, sounding hugely relieved. "He really sounded like he meant it, though."

"Yes, he did," Evan agreed thoughtfully. It was very, very interesting, and he had a whole _list_ of things to grill Spike about now. "I expect I shall have to get him drunk later on to get the taste out of his mouth." Or something.

Patil looked as though the world had stopped being upside-down for him, although Lupin still looked like he was turning things over in his mind, very slowly. "What brings you two, here, anyway?"

"Oh, I hoped I could get in ahead of her," Evan sighed. "Found out too late, though."

"I just wanted to ask if there'd been any news about the Cooper girl," Lupin said with suspicious meekness.

Patil shook his head. "Sorry, old man. Still no joy. We'll send you an owl if we hear anything, promise."

So, Evan thought, Lupin had been withholding a second purpose, not lying about his stated one. Might not be important, but it was a small puzzle partly solved. And right next to it was the enormous, gapingly blank one of '76. Evan had in his hand now the first pieces that had ever, ever looked like they might fit.

Lupin went off like a man pretending not to be thwarted, and Patil looked inquiringly at Evan. "I'll wait for Severus," Evan said. "Since I'm here, I may as well see he has lunch."

"Well, if you do get him drunk, make sure he takes a sobering potion before he comes back," Patil warned. "This stage of the potion's been volatile before, and we're not sure we're right about how it'll react to what Ming wants to try."

"Can I go say hello to her," Evan asked, "or is it a Stay Out Of The Stillroom day?"

Patil gave a considering smile that bloomed suddenly. "SOOTS," he said. "I shall make a sign. Yes, I'd keep away if I were wearing clothes like yours. I'll tell her for you, though."

Evan nodded, and asked, "May I use your memo pad? I need to apologize profusely to poor old Diggory."

"By the door."

"Thanks," Evan said, and they both bent to their writing. Evan had only just wand-tapped his second note into a paper airplane and sent it zooming off to find Diggory when Spike and the Ministry witch came back. "Oh, there you are, Snape," he said pleasantly, every inch the bored young pureblood only working to please the old pater's notions of character building. True enough, financially, although anyone who tried to take his paintbox would have been rapidly distracted by the search for their hands.

Umbridge would have no difficulty learning he and Spike were flatmates, if she bothered to look them up. Flatmates weren't always friends, but she still might be able to learn on her own that they were known allies, even known bed-friends. He wasn't giving a poison pill like her the knowledge that they were intimate and cared about each other beyond pleasure and alliance, though, not without a good reason. Knowledge like that could be powerful.

Besides, the mere thought of being known like that by a stranger would have made Severus queasy. Maybe even hysterical. In the case of this curdled-treacle witch, Evan could quite see his point.

He gave the inspector only his fifth-best social smile, so when he 'learned who she was' he could upgrade it and make her think him favorably impressed with her position. "And—I don't know you; new apprentice?"

"No indeed," Spike said, giving him a _what are you up to_ look, and introduced them.

"And what is your association with the project, Mr. Rosier?"

"It's Master Rosier, actually, but do call me Evan," he said, smiling benignly down at her. A portraitist's mastery didn't have as many formal requirements as a brewer's or healer's. You just had to prove you were a competent representational painter and that your work could be relied on to come to life when its subjects died. That wasn't easy, though; even a talented painter who knew what to do with a wand might go through hundreds of rats, toads, and bugs before catching all the tricks of that suite of spells. The title carried at least as much weight as it did in other professions.

Portraitists, after all, were the best hope wizards had of securing an immortal legacy for themselves or their ideas. Descendents were notoriously unreliable that way, while books and letters could be misunderstood, read out of historical context, or otherwise interpreted in ways one hadn't intended. And an afterlife in ectoplasm looked attractive to very few.

"No association whatever, Miss Umbridge," he went on. No painter was well-advised to call any witch 'ma'am,' as Spike had, unless she'd chosen to wear a muggle-style wedding ring or not fight going grey. Or was clearly less than two years past graduation and on her dignity. "I'm a portraitist. And, you know, if you'll forgive my cheek, you have the most _interesting_ face. You must owl me if ever you want a work done." He produced a card and folded it into her hand.

He kept warm eye contact with her as they talked, but he could see Spike's face in his periphery, and enjoyed it thoroughly. It was a rueful, impressed, and very heated look that he easily translated into _dammit, I thought I'd been doing well_. Evan would have to disabuse him of this self-depreciating nonsense, and added that task to the list.

By the time he was ready to let Umbridge go, he had a commission which was going to make him brush up on feline anatomy, and she had the firm impression that she might make the acquaintance of the Black Malfoy bride in the process of getting it filled. Which she absolutely would, although Ev would warn Narcissa about her comprehensively first.

Having gotten all he wanted, he gave Spike the signal. Spike said, "I beg your pardon, Madam Umbridge, but I really ought to get back to work if—actually, Rosier, what did you want?"

"I'm taking you out to lunch," Evan told him, in a _don't argue with me_ voice.

"Er, no, you're not, because I'm having a sandwich from upstairs and going back to work."

"Oh, I'm sure that's what you think you're doing," he said pleasantly, "but you'll find that you have, in fact, been totally misinformed.* You can't possibly imagine that you're going to get away with wasting being presentable in the middle of the day. Besides, you wouldn't let an old schoolfellow run out of brush-cleaner, would you? Shocking bad form, old man."

Severus started to argue again, very sensibly showing the inspector nothing but dedication. Before he'd said anything, though, he caught Evan's eyes. His gaze dropped for a flicker of a second to Evan's mouth, and back up. " _Blacks_ ," he said crossly to the little witch in a giving-up sort of voice. It was the most efficient piece of name-dropping Evan had ever seen, but jumping him would have to wait till they got home. "Is there anything else you need, Madam Umbridge?"

"Oh, I should just like a tiny little word with these other two before I go," she said with what still couldn't quite be called a little smile.

"Of course," Severus said. "Rosier, will you die of hyperventilation if you have to wait half a minute while I check Patil's work before you drag me out by the hair?"

"Tick-tock," Evan said placidly, yawning for good measure and netting himself a dirty look. He amused himself by imagining what Severus was hissing in Pat's ear. Variations on _follow my lead or die colorfully_ , no doubt.

Severus stopped just before they left the building, and pulled out his fountain pen and the piece of memo paper he'd deftly snagged from the pad by the door. "That should be enough time; wait a moment. I need to tell Lovegood," he started.

Evan wordlessly handed him the other memo, written before Severus and Umbridge had gotten back, and basked in Severus's face when he realized how thoroughly anticipated he'd been. It was always a bit of a pity not to be able to see black eyes dilating, but there were other tells.

"We're not really eating out, are we?" he was asked cautiously as they stepped into the soggy, grayish sunshine, the memo zooming downstairs behind them, behind the dingy false front of an abandoned department store. "I'm not particularly hungry."

"Don't be ridiculous," Evan said, and, taking his arm, apparated them home. A scant instant after arriving, he heard the secondary _crack_ that almost certainly meant an invisible Potter was stalking Spike again. Although, given today, it might have been Lupin. There'd be a new entry in the log-book in Evan's vault, so he could find out if he decided he needed to know.

Either way, he made a point of plastering Spike against the door. Crowding in against him, hands capturing his wrists, he murmured, "Since when can you play a fish like that? We are going to have _words,_ mockingbird…"

"New thing we're working on," Spike gasped, shuddering against him.

"Tell me _all_ about it."

"If you don't let me open the door I'm turning it insubstantial," Spike said breathlessly, the feel of his voice-box buzzing Evan's lips.

"On the floor in the hall is fine by me…"

 _"No,_ " Spike said firmly, and fumbled their way through the lock and upstairs. Evan made a second point of being in no way helpful at all until their own flat's door was decorously locked behind them.

"How much of a discount are you going to have to give Diggory?" Spike asked idly, later on, his fingers languid on Evan's chest.

Evan chuckled into his hair, and felt a ghost of a smile tug uninsistently against his skin. "For that tip, I'm almost tempted to charge him at-cost. Mum would make me pay the balance, though."

"She might anyway, risking a commission just to give me a warning."

"Oh, would you stop that; she does not hate you."

"Not personally," Spike allowed. "My blood, though, that she hates. And she'd hate anyone that got between her and grandmotherhood."

Which he was. It would be a long time before they forgot how much discomfort and heartbreaking trouble Bella and Narcissa had both had with their pregnancies. Not an attractive prospect, or one that inspired confidence, even now that they had reason to suspect some of Narcissa's problems had been externally imposed. Spike, as a woman, didn't exactly have the kind of hips that promised an easy birth, while Evan was closely enough related on both sides to the Black sisters that their experiences were very relevant to his prospects.

Neither were either of them keen on being female for as long as a baby would need—or on having the other be female for that long, either. A few hours or even a few days now and then was a lovely change of pace, but nine months plus nursing? No. It was a miracle Spike could even enjoy the occasional few hours before getting restless and itchy in his skin, given what his first time had been like.

And then there was the whole idea of a stranger growing inside you, of someone who wasn't a lover _moving_ in you. Narcissa was very enthusiastic about this, and didn't seem to think about it as a stranger (or an it), but… And the other idea of being a wrong (and ungainly, and vulnerable) shape that made people think they knew the most important things about you. That maybe even changed you so they were right.

Spike could barely tolerate those thoughts in relation to his friends, although he'd put up a very good front because Narcissa had needed him unruffled and supportive. He'd been nearly hysterical just at the _thought_ of enduring them himself when Ev's mum had hopefully brought up the idea. Evan couldn't blame him, although Mum had Not Been Pleased. Ev's own reaction to the prospect of going through all that wasn't nearly so violent, but if he had known the word _squick,_ he… still wouldn't have used such emphatic muggle slang. _Unappealing_ sufficed, if paired with the right slightly pained _not on, old thing_ expression.

"I keep telling you she'd get over it if you let her plan a handfasting," Evan said mildly. "At least mostly. It's amazing what witches will forgive if you give them an excuse to get wrapped up in wedding plans and cry sentimental tears over lace handkerchiefs and enormous puddings."

"Yes, well," Spike smiled into his shoulder, "the minute you work out how to surf over the hideous, dragon-sized attack of shock and snobbery when your family's entire social network—which, let me reiterate, is twice the size of the USSR—work out that my guests who aren't colleagues or also your guests would consist of my mother, the end, and then only maybe…"

"You just think you'd have a paralytic fit, having to emote in public," he laughed. Severus was exaggerating, but that wasn't the point Evan cared about at the moment.

"You can't possibly think I wouldn't," Severus returned, grimly amused.

"Oh, I don't know," Ev said lightly, closing the trap on him. "You could probably fake faking it. You were _awfully_ convincing back at your lab."

"…Oh, I see," sighed Severus, after a quick review of the last few minutes. "Nice, Ev."

"Ta. Now, this 'new thing we're trying.'"

Severus untangled himself and stood (alas), freshening up (fair enough) and pulling his clothes back on (calamity!). Since when he came back it was with Evan's clothes, Evan, although he didn't actually stick out his tongue, said with long-suffering resignation, "I suppose we'd better get you fed while you're on your lunch break. Bare bones do dreadful things when they fall into cauldrons, as I recall."

The wicked look Spike shot him was holding about at least four evil comments, but aloud he just allowed, "I could eat."

"You're not having another damned sandwich!" Evan called after him (Spike was so bad for one's vocabulary).

"Yes, Mam!" Spike called derisively back.

"This isn't much of an improvement," Evan sighed when he got to the kitchen. "You really want breakfast twice?"

"Not having it twice."

" _Severus…_ "

"Shut up and eat," Severus said, putting a plate of toast, perfectly sliced plums, and herbed, fluffy, cheesy eggs in front of him.

"I think I'm going to tell Mum she's finally right about my eating like a helpless muggle bachelor," Evan reflected. "She'll come and be sadly reproachful at you, Spike. Or tell the elf he has to come every day."

"You'd burn down the kitchen trying to make eggs like these," Severus told him, sitting down with his own plate. It had about a third as much food as Evan's. Ev considered cramming a piece of toast down his heart's throat, like a goose destined for _foie gras_. "And muggle bachelors are on their own, as a rule, these days, no elflike help. As you would be implying. So I would be able to tell her, with perfect truth, that you were lying to get me in trouble."

"Speaking of trouble."

Spike sighed. "Yes, all right." He poked at his eggs and took a wedge of plum instead, stalling.

"Tell me what you did," Evan said quietly, reaching over to pin his wrist gently to the table, curling his fingers around the bony knob that wasn't sensitive, stroking his thumb over the pulse point that more than made up for it.

Severus's eyes flickered at him, then dropped. As quietly, he said, "I made myself that person."

"I don't understand."

Spike shivered all over his skin—not in fear, but like an irritated horse. "I took facts and decided to feel a different way about them. And that was how I felt about them in that moment, so… I said what I felt."

Evan thought about that for a while as the eggs vanished. Finally he said, "I don't understand."

"Look, have you ever felt like you had a choice about how to react?"

"Do I look like a Gryffindor?"

"Well, actually, Red…"

" _Spike…_ "

"Yes, all right. I… went back in time, in my head, to when I had to choose how to feel about… to when I decided to aim how I felt at the curse instead of the cursed. And turned myself into someone who'd made the other choice, the one she'd obviously made. Or who didn't see there was a choice, a difference."

"Still not following."

He sighed, getting annoyed. "I lied to me, not her. About myself, not facts."

"How can you do that?"

"By… I suppose, by changing the story you've told yourself about something."

"Still don't understand."

Now vexed, the cobra eyed him ill-temperedly and asked through gritted teeth, "What, exactly, do you not understand?"

"I don't understand," Evan said, just as distinctly, meeting the hood-flaring look with his own flat snake eyes, "how, if you weren't lying about the facts, _I didn't know you were nearly EATEN BY A WEREWOLF, **SEVERUS**._ "

"Oh." Severus sat back and made a face, but did not look in the least ashamed or guilty. Angry, definitely that, though an old anger he was too used to to feel sharply anymore. "Because I was telling the truth there, too: I can't talk about it. Can not. Not physically possible."

"Not magically possible, you mean," Evan posited, eying him narrowly.

"Can not discuss."

"But you could tell her."

"I could tell the bare bones to a person who had no information with which to wire them together. She doesn't know who, where, or when."

"I think I could take a stab at the when, and more or less the where. Might even have a guess about the who."

"It seems you think you can," Severus said levelly. "I can neither confirm nor deny any supposition you might make."

"With no exceptions?"

"Only a true belief that lives are at imminent risk and only knowledge could protect them."

"And how did you get roped into _that_?" he demanded, appalled. Breaking even the more innocuous forms of wizarding oaths had consequences one did not want to invite.

"Lack of perceived options. I was in several kinds of shock at the time, you realize."

"I don't suppose," and now his teeth were gritted, "you're able to tell me who made you commit to something like that when you couldn't think straight."

"I am not able," Severus agreed carefully, and bit into his toast. He looked thoughtful and said, very experimentally, with pauses between every few words to gauge their effect on himself, "I think I can tell you that it wasn't the werewolf him-or-herself. Ah. I can."

"Which means," he said, in a white, cold fury, "that it must have been Dumbledore."

"That's not a totally illogical conclusion, but only if you're right about absolutely everything," Spike said mildly. "Only if you have your facts _and_ reasoning nailed. Maybe you do. It's also entirely possible that someone will work out Mithridates' Shield this century. And I couldn't tell you right or wrong if you said you were sure it was _you_."

That short-circuited the anger. Evan regarded him with a quizzical caution. "…Why would I be sure it was me?"

Severus shrugged. "Only example I could give without making you wonder about whoever I named. I know perfectly well that you know I like the double-or-triple-bluff confusion tactic."

Evan stabbed at his toast, which broke. After a moment, he said, "I don't like this other thing, either, Spike." It came out threatening.

"Ah," Spike said, making another little face and spearing some fruit. "Not my idea."

" _His_."

Spike nodded. "At least, he wants me to get better at dishonesty. I'm much better at spinning the truth than making up lies, so we've been working with that."

"I could have told him that. _Avery_ could have told him that."

"Do you think so?"

"…Maybe. Probably. He's not _Lockhart_." Evan mulled unhappily for a few bites. "I still don't like it," he decided. "What happened to those scrolls and chapters about will-based magic disorganizing brains?"

"It's not magic," Severus said. Evan was slightly relieved until he added, less certainly, "I don't think."

"Anything more likely to drive you completely crazy at terminal velocity would be harder to imagine, Spike," he said, grim. "Magic or not."

Severus looked as though he were struggling with something, and finally sighed. "I don't like it, either," he admitted. "The thing is, Ev—it's easy. Very easy. It's the only really Slytherin thing that's ever come naturally."

"You took to hexing people like a fish to water," Evan said, trying for a light tone.

Spike shook his head. "I think I had to do this to do that, Ev. Just… just _turn off_ everything but the angry. All the yes-but-if-you-do thoughts, all the take-it-or-hide habits."

"When you do it," Evan asked, drumming his fingers on the table, "is it like… like telling bits of yourself to shut up, or what?"

"No, it's… maybe, for you, try a visual," he said doubtfully, and aimed his wand at Evan.

Evan's vision swam white, and after a moment the words _data_ and _what-if_ , repeated a thousand times in dozens of colors, started ambling and zipping over the white everything. Then one blue _data_ flashed bright red, loomed large, and was suddenly reading _THREAT_.

Evan's vision tunneled until that red word was all he could see, just that, and everything else black. Then the red word's text changed again, so that it read _MAIM_ , made up of thousands and millions of tiny little bursts of _shred HERE_ and _aim HERE_ and _slash LOTS,_ and loomed until it took over Evan's whole world.

This bit he understood perfectly. Narcissa (who'd thoroughly enjoyed Divination) said the way his vision had filled with a bloody haze once or twice (in extremis. Completely justified.) was because he was a Taurus. That although he had Sorted respectably and usually did act like it, bulls were liable to single-mindedly charge at things.

Ev thought it had more to do with being half-Black and completely gone on someone who was quite good at self-defense but _mind-blowingly bad_ at not needing to be. It wasn't as though she'd never gone Blackishly histrionic herself. Which, while perfectly understandable since all the times Evan knew about had been at Spike or about her sisters or one of the babies she'd been trying to have, was hardly a Cancer trait.

The illusion dissolved, and he was back in the kitchen. "That's the best I think I can explain it," said Spike. "Only, when I do it, I'm deciding to. —In the sense of doing that instead of nothing, I mean," he added, in a tone that told Evan he thought he was explaining something vital rather than tripping haplessly all over himself, "doing that instead of just… curling up and enduring it, letting it happen. I don't mean doing it instead of something else. It's what there is to do. I have to decide there is something I can do. I have to decide that even though there will be consequences, put them aside, they don't exist, either they don't exist or _you_ don't exist, not as a person you can stand—I can stand, I can stand to be—so _do something_. And that's what there is."

Evan pinched the dip of his nose. "And you've been doing this how long?" he asked wearily.

"Oh, I was getting bullied long before Hogwarts," Spike sighed. "Started fighting back the second it occurred to me the other kids couldn't take it out on Mam if I did. Not even if I won." He smiled. It showed no teeth, but was in every other way a cold, dead-eyed shark smile. "So I won until they stopped. Worked less well at Hogwarts, but by then, instinctive."

"And it's _easy_?"

"Oh, yes," Severus said in a hard, faraway voice. "A little more complicated to do it in a sophisticated way, like in the lab. But taking myself out of myself, letting whatever's left do the moving… yes. That's easy."

 _Well,_ Evan thought to himself, still pinching between his eyes, _we always knew he was a bit crazy_. "All right," he said finally. "You don't know for sure whether you're using a dark magic to do it. And you said it's the only Slytherin thing that's come easily. Will you do something for my peace of mind, Naj?"

"Such as…?"

"Find out whether it really is a Slytherin thing. If it's a known thing that's been done, it'll have a history and you can find out whether it's dangerous."

Spike tilted his head at him curiously. "And how do you mean for me to find that out?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Credit** : *Five points to the house of those who can explain why I could not resist that Ptribute. (g)
> 
>  _A Shropshire Lad_ is by A.E. Housman.
> 
>  **Notes** : In the last draft but one (ie: last night), the Evan-muse decided he had decided in first-year Potions to play a little game with his Gryffie cauldron partner, wherein he what-whatted and doncherknowed and so on, to see how long it would take before Lupin made him admit he was being silly. He noted that realizing Lupin had been genuinely gullible about this explained a lot to him about Lupin's relationship with Sirius, and that while this was a sad realization for him, being thought mutton-headed was always very useful. 
> 
> However, today he was already bored with it and admitted he in no way had the discipline for a long con like that which required actual, y'know, effort. Also, he was too ~~depressed~~ full of pureblood ennui to try and make friends by being silly. So I took it out.


	37. The Three Broomsticks, Hogsmeade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Warnings/Summary** : Our Antiheroes* meet again, and Professor Snape Teaches Defense Against the Dark Hormones.
> 
> You heard me.
> 
> (But no one actually cries, kills themselves, or has a vegetative stroke.)
> 
> (But Sibyll will be mincemeat.)
> 
> Despite this chapter, Albus will hire Severus to teach. To teach children. And teenagers. Within the decade. It's canon! Well, we already knew ol' Sherbetbe(e)ard couldn't carry a tune in a straightjacket...
> 
> * yes, I know that's not quite the right term, but I'm not sure there actually is one for Someone Who's In The Hero Position And Actually Heroic And Very Intelligent But Morally Very Grey. I guess 'picaresque rogue' could apply to Severus, but not to Albus, and Severus would sulk if he got slotted into a role so closely connoted with anything in the comedy category, even satire...

"Oh," Severus said, drawing back almost as soon as he'd come in. Albus, facing the door, was looking right at him, and was sure the boy would have just stolen away again without speaking if he hadn't been. "I'm sorry, Professors… am I early, Professor Slughorn?"

"No, no," Horace said, swiveling around (to the extent he could; he'd never been supple anywhere but in the opinion) and beaming. Filius and Pomona also looked up and waved, with every evidence of pleasure. Minerva only peered over the tops of her square spectacles, without affect. "I do apologize, Severus; our staff meeting is running late. Rosmerta, my dear! A butterbeer for—"

"That's all right, sir," Severus said hastily. Albus wasn't surprised; he would have offered the boy coffee or gin, himself. He did not take Severus for the type to enjoy the comforts of butterbeer. "I'll just go to the bookstore and be back in, what, ten minutes? Half an hour?"

"If ten minutes doesn't do it," Minerva told Albus, with one of those expressions where he couldn't quite tell whether she was half-joking or purely fantasizing out loud, "fifteen at the outside, I'll strangle you with your own beard."

"Forty-five it is," Severus said cynically, and popped out again. Silently enhancing his hearing with a wiggle of his wand, Albus heard him mutter, "—me to come early on purpose, _not subtle_ , Pornstache… can't dodge it now," and sigh. Then there were only footsteps, so he cut the spell.

And tried very hard to forget he'd ever heard his old friend called anything worse than 'walrus-face.' Children were getting so hard-edged these days…

"Come to ask if he's hired?" Filius asked Horace, who shook his head.

Albus tactfully decided not to notice that his fellow mugwump's sympathy for Severus's overreach turned just slightly smirky when it bent on Horace. Or how the irritation under Horace's head-shake showed that this subtle shift was not lost on Albus's Deputy Head.

"Well," Albus said, with a smile for Minerva, "if it is to be twenty minutes—"

" _Ten_!"

"—we mustn't waste the time."

It was a mere five minutes later that they were ready for the last roadblock. Albus really had been expecting a full fifteen, as they had three strong final DADA candidates (none of whom had just left the pub). Pomona turned out, though, to be an unexpected and strong proponent of Gawain Robards.

Robards wanted to see whether he could stand working within an organized hierarchy before applying for Auror training. Albus was somewhat reluctant to allow his school to be used as an experiment. Pomona, though had a most convincing argument: Robards had been unusually effective with Peeves while at school.

She also thought if they could knock a little of the pomposity and impatience out of him before he put on the brown-and-gold it would be a service to wizardkind. Minerva snarked that the first and fifth years would probably get that done without trying, and didn't argue against him. Filius shuffled the papers, commented that no one else had anything so tempting as the ability to terrorize Peeves, and since Horace had suggested the man to Albus in the first place, that was that.

"Well, then," Albus beamed, eternally hopeful, "then that settles—"

"Not even to get out early," Minerva quashed him firmly. "Who is this Trelawney girl, anyway?"

"Haven't you had the time to get to know her, Minerva?" he asked.

"She isn't exactly sociable," Minerva said, exasperated.

"She's just nervous. Never been anywhere like Hogwarts, I gather, and you intimidate her, Minerva," said Pomona comfortably. "I've found her perfectly friendly, the poor dear."

"Anyway, who is she? I've never heard of her, but she doesn't sound like she went to school out of the country."

"Home educated, my dear," Albus said, and listened to _die Fliedermaus_ inside his head until the groaning had trailed off. "She makes a good deal of her grandmother, Cassandra—"

"Ah," Filius noted, sipping his Black Forest with a reminiscent look that Albus in no way wanted to ask about.

"But she's… she's _reasonably_ sound on most of the accessible methods of divination, and is eager to get at our library. Pomona, you took Divination yourself, I believe?"

"I haven't used anything but almanac work in years, though," she protested.

"Nevertheless, if she's taken to you, I'd like you to work with me in helping her to make her lesson plans."

"You're set on this," Minerva sighed.

"I believe the school will benefit her," Albus said benignly.

And it was a question of the school benefiting her more than the reverse. He would have preferred to leave the post vacant and give the subject's time-slot to alchemy, technomancy, or (if anyone capable could be coaxed) integrated theory.

Alas, while he was far from convinced that young Snape was unreachable, if the boy hadn't been pulled in by Tom's crowd Albus would eat his hat. Which would be almost pity enough to counter a surprise as happy as that, as today's hat was rather a snazzy one and its decorations didn't look easily digestible.

He had, therefore, moved the Welsh witch directly into the castle, for her own protection. Albus was optimistic, not happy-go-lucky. Tom hadn't risked attacking anyone magical since his return to Britain—at least, not in any way that Albus had been able to definitively trace back to him. If, however, he decided that an unknown nonentity like Miss Trelawney had been prophesizing about _him…_

"In any case," he added, "the other two applicants are a squib who's been working the traveling shows and an Austrian with a Mayan fixation who was rather cagey with me about what he was doing during the war."

Minerva put her forehead down on the table and wrapped her arms around her ears. Filius and Horace both patted her back paternally. "Buck up, Min," Pomona said, dimpling in both cheeks and her chin. "The girl won't say boo to you. You'll have loads of fun."

"Reasonably sound," Minerva parroted in a kind of stern and muffled wail. "No _references_. Flinchy. She'll be _mincemeat_."

"That's what Mona said," Filius grinned.

"I meant the _hooligans_."

"Do I still know how to get in touch with everyone, should something come up?" Albus asked, surfing gently over them. "No one's itinerary has changed?"

"I thought I'd hare off to Siberia," Pomona said placidly, and they all smiled. She was the only one, besides Albus, who stayed in residence year-round. She always said she couldn't bear to give up what she and the summer weather combined could do for the grounds, and took herself off to hot places for the winter hols when she could.

"But actually, Headmaster, I would appreciate it if you could arrange an international portkey to Hawaii for me. I have a friend who's moved there recently, and she says she may be able to help me get a good deal on coffee and some quite interesting seeds."

He nodded, speculating fondly that the friend was probably a former student. Pomona didn't network aggressively, as Horace did, but the effect wasn't dissimilar.

"Don't leave without the coffee!" Filius urged, seconded by Horace. Minerva asked why, and Filius and Pomona exploded all over her with excited twittering on their way out the door.

"What is it about the girl?" Horace asked curiously, meaning Trelawney, when the others were gone.

"Do you really want to know, old friend?" Albus asked.

 _"No_ ," Horace said emphatically, thus warned, and checked his watch. "I suppose I had better track down young Severus and tell him we're done."

"No need, Horace," Albus twinkled at him. "I should quite like to stretch my legs."

"Be gentle, Albus," Horace said uneasily. "The boy's high-strung."

"I shall be," Albus assured him airily, "the soul of—"

"Oh, dear," said Horace, the soul of glum.

Albus strode off into the sunshine, at his leisure, and into Tomes and Scrolls. It took him only a moment to determine that the boy wasn't in there. He hoped Snape hadn't done a runner.

Reassured but confused when his locating spell pointed him straight at the sweetshop, he took off for it. He became just slightly less confused when the spell led him to the alley between Honeydukes and the gift-and-card shop. Reaching the mouth of the alley, he felt his eyebrows tug up.

Snape was sitting crosslegged on the grass, drawing lines with his wand in a cleared patch of earth, covered in young girls.

Only the youngest was actually on him, but they were all crowded around him intently. It took Albus a minute to identify them all, as they of course weren't wearing their school robes. Estelle Travers was wearing a hat that told him it was her birthday party. The others were also Slytherin and Ravenclaw girls going into their fourth and fifth years, apart from (presumably) someone's little sister. The little girl, who had the look of Miss Ollivander, was draped over Snape's back to see what he was doing. He was tolerating it with the uncomfortable resignation of someone who had given up on shaking or glowering her off ages ago.

"I do not believe for one moment," he was saying, annoyed, to the older girls, "that every one of you twitterpates is going to remember a diagram perfectly five minutes from now, let alone in September. Any one of you, frankly. Hasn't _anyone_ got a notebook?"

"We're having a _party_ , Naj," Travers said, aggrieved.

"And you interrupted it to pester me, so belt up your whinging. You two at least should know better," he said severely to the Ravenclaw girls, who grinned at him. "No, all of you should. Always assume you might be lucky or quick enough to learn something that shouldn't be forgotten." He turned to the little girl on his back, and asked, just as severely, "Understood?"

"Always bring a notebook!" she echoed cheerfully.

"Well," he said, sliding the older girls a perfect Minerva fish-eye, "at least one of you may grow up with some sense." They laughed, and he said, "All right, here." Digging his own notebook and a fountain pen out of a pocket, he ripped out a page and cast the geminus charm on it and the pen until there were six of each. "Copy it until it looks right, and then show me," he said.

Albus went on watching. He didn't make himself invisible, but he also didn't make any noise.

When all of the diagrams had been examined and corrected, Albus distinctly heard Miss Fawley console Miss Ollivander, "No, it's just Sodding Snape Commentary™, you're fine really, he's just _awful_ like that."

"I am extremely awful in my insistence that you get it _right_ ," Snape said dryly. "Ollivander, yes, you were largely accurate, but if you put Fehu instead of Algiz and muck up that angle by the Tehwaz, you'll feel yourself no end an accomplished vamp while wearing it, instead of being protected from social diseases. _Don't_ eyeball the angles on arrays. I don't care how much of a sorceress you are at gobstones; Digitalin shows you that protraction charm for a reason."

Albus's eyebrows shot up as he realized what the girls were being taught.

Snape went on, "You're all getting close enough to your OWLs that you _need_ to develop a habit of accuracy. Which," he said sternly to the littlest girl, "you should start as soon as possible so it comes as less of a shock. Will and precision are everything, in magic. What makes up precision?"

"See it," she recited, screwing up her eyes, "know it, um…"

"Re…" Snape prompted her.

" _Reproduce_ it!" she said triumphantly.

"Just so," he nodded sharply, looking pleased without smiling. "You can say 'copy,' I suppose, although that sounds less reputable... Eye, brain, hand, will. _Accurate_ , and mean it hard. Trying this and that to see what happens is how we advance, quite right," this was to Miss Ollivander, "but we _use in practice_ the results of experiments that have already been proven. Which we can rely on," he turned back to the little girl, "and be accurate about. Maths will help you there; make sure you get a good grounding in that even if you don't understand at first why it's not dull. And see you _are_ playing as much gobstones as Exploding Snap; Snap's all right for the reflexes, but gobstones will give you good control of your wand hand, too, and a sense for angles and force. And for when to duck."

"Naj," asked Miss Greengrass, "do the scarves have to be special?"

"Ah," Snape said, in a _good question_ tone. "Strictly speaking, no, but if you just use anything, the enchantment won't be as strong. You'll be best off weaving a grey silk scarf yourselves. Anything from silver to charcoal should do well. If it's too pale, you might run into trouble when you stop using it. Artemis does not support changing one's mind in these matters." The girls nodded, although the little one looked confused. "Happily, an embroidery of either snakes or owls is considered appropriate, so any of you should be able to pass it off as House spirit."

"Ravenclaw does eagles," Miss Ollivander pointed out, looking taken aback at his ignorance.

"Really?" Snape asked, raising an unimpressed eyebrow at her. "Seven years in those hallowed halls and I am only now enlightened. I really must complain to Miss Chang as was. With whom I work every day. Because I recommended her to my supervisor. Because I knew her at school and had numerous opportunities to see her in academic robes. With the crest on. Not to mention we already had mixed-House classes six thousand oh I do beg your pardon I mean TWO years ago. Were you just a second-year? A first-year? You were not. Are you a transfer? No. So you were _there_ two years ago! And know this! What?"

Miss Montague whispered something in his ear with an ominous and meaningful look at Ollivander's crumbling expression, and then at Ollivander's little sister (presumably), tapping her pen on her hip with a pint-sized glower.

Snape sighed, and rubbed his eye. Rather more gently, he said, "That is, while, yes, the House is represented by an eagle, it shares symbolism with owls. They usually mean wisdom, when they don't mean night or mail. Not always by any means, but it's their most common meaning in Western magic. It's not a perfect match, no, but it's universal enough imagery that you can, as I said, pass it off."

"But—weave it ourselves?" Miss Travers groaned.

"A plain one, at least, shouldn't be difficult. You needn't do it like a muggle," Snape told her, seeming rather grateful for the change of subject. "I daresay most of your grandmothers would be delighted to teach you."

He seemed to be wrapping up, so Albus cleared his throat gently.

Snape jumped so hard the little girl squeaked and jumped herself, which was a problem for her: his free hand had darted to the top of her head, shoving her down behind him. His wand flashed straight to Albus's heart before he realized who he was looking at and lowered it. The girls, slower, looked between them in alarm, although the older Slytherins, less surprised at his jitters, exchanged a knowing look. Miss Ollivander looked though she wasn't sure she should be taking instruction from a mental case but was also considering forgiving him for being inexcusably snide at her.

"That's me," he said, putting his wand away with air of a cat who had just bounced nose-first off a window chasing a bird and wanted everyone to be quite sure it had meant to do that. "I have your words you'll make sure all the girls learn it, especially any of you that's chosen as a prefect? And any of the boys who start to seem…" He waved a hand vaguely. "Harried." All the Slytherins nodded, although the Ravenclaws looked sharply curious. "And get it _right_ ," he reiterated, scowling around at them.

"Sure, Naj," Miss Fawley said, giving him a fond _you're such an over-reactor_ look that Albus knew she'd absorbed from her father. "But you don't really think anyone's going to _need_ them."

"The thing is," Snape told her, "almost everyone believes they're a decent person. Really does believe it. And why not? Their reasons for doing things are their reasons, which they understand and which make sense to them. And because they do believe, most can convince others. They aren't lying, after all. And most people are just normally selfish. But the ones who aren't are usually the best at faking it, and anyone may forget himself sometimes. There doesn't even have to be magic or alcohol involved, I regret. A bad day or a self-centered mood is enough. So don't get careless just because you think someone's sincere: their sincerity may not promise what you think it does. Off, you," he added to the little girl with an unsmilingly friendly eye, and stood to join Albus without further ceremony.

"Athena's Girdle, Severus?" Albus asked, raising an eyebrow again.

"They told me who's been picked for prefect since I left," Severus replied. "I wouldn't trust any of them but Perry Blakeney to protect a manticore."

"You don't think Horace chose well?" Albus asked mildly.

Severus shrugged. "Can't agree with the how-well without agreeing with the what-for. Professor Slughorn gives power to the ones he thinks can make the most use of it. He's a kingmaker, Professor; he's never been particularly interested in the proles or the weak. If one of us doesn't take up that task, it doesn't get done."

"You didn't want to wait to find out if you might teach it to them in class?" he inquired.

Severus eyed him, cynical. "After panicking all over your brother just because your other applicant started bellowing impressively behind me? Not particularly. Although, in my defense, I have damned good reason to have a strong startle reflex, and I'd argue that having one is desirable when it comes to DADA. Given how vehemently he threw me downstairs, though, I thought, once I calmed down, that I must have come close to taking his eye out trying to get behind him. He is all right, I hope?"

"Oh, fine, fine," said Albus, who didn't come close to believing this implied ignorance. He doubted Severus would think Albus could obliviate away something that had happened weeks ago, but the boy wouldn't want to be asked questions, either. Happily for him (more or less), Albus was quite sure he could answer his own questions without asking. "Not hurt a bit."

"I hope you didn't hire that jackass, either," Severus grumbled, and finished scathingly, "Someone who resorts to a _sonorous_ in an _interview…_ "

"That won't be our new Defense teacher," Albus assured him. Was he misleading Severus, or merely not making difficulties for him as he struck a politely plausible-enough pose? Round and round we go… "But why were you still there, Severus? Aberforth said you looked quite ill."

Severus tilted his head forward, obscuring his face with his hair in embarrassment. "I didn't let myself be nervous before the interview, and while we were talking I was caught up in it, but," his shoulders squirmed a little, "I didn't get more than a couple of steps past the door before my knees gave."

Albus twinkled at him, and asked in a sorrowful voice, "Am I really so frightening as all that?"

"Er, _yes,_ " Severus said, sliding him _are you as crazy as you look_ eyes.

"You wound me," he laughed. "But, although I'm afraid we won't be offering you the post this year, don't think it's because you made a poor showing, Severus. We had a very good crop of candidates, and our finalists were quite experienced."

"May I ask who you're going with?" he asked, interested, and Albus told him. His brows bounced up, and he said, still interested, "I've read Robard's articles on exorcisms. And his consumer-review of dark detectors."

"What did you think?"

"His assessments of their quality were credible, and if he was biased it wasn't obvious. But he has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about concealment. Everyone has secrets, and secrecy revealers don't make distinctions between going grey, covering a bruise, dishonesty over homework, having hurt someone, or planning to." He gave Albus a rather glinty smile, and added, "And I think Peeves is going to have an interesting year."

"I'm glad you're taking this well, Severus," Albus said. "I don't believe Robards is planning to stay with us long; you'll be most welcome to apply again."

"I think Belby's grant may be renewed after all," Snape told him. "We may have gotten one of the more strident nay-voices turned around. Other people reconsider out of sheer surprise, when that happens without bribery or extortion to explain it. As I told you, leaving the project was never my first choice."

"That's wonderful," Albus said, and meant it. "Is that what you wanted to speak to Horace about?"

Severus considered the question, and eventually said, "Only a little. I need to talk to an expert in Slytherin."

"How intriguing," Albus twinkled. "Of course, Severus, as an observer of the school and all its Houses, for many, many years, I should be delighted to—"

"That," Severus sighed, more or less to himself, pinching his eyes together dismally, "is what I was afraid of."


	38. Still the Three Broomticks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caught between his boss and his most volatile, shoutiest alum, can Horace stand the strain? Will the head of the Order squash the suspected DE like a bug, or can a sly young serpent wind an old optimist around his little finger? What is a 'normal Slytherin mind-trick' anyway, and what will happen to the pineapples?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** for implied past child abuse. And mood control that could be disturbing and/or creepy.
> 
> Less serious warnings for Fun With Lineage. This topic was previously introduced in [: ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/989821>)[May](http://archiveofourown.org/works/989821/chapters/1990350), btw, for anyone who's skipped the prequels or wants to revisit that or its notes; am not pulling it out of nowhere.
> 
>  **WOOT!** We have hit 1000 hits! You would have gotten two chapters next time anyway, but now there will also be a ~~Spice Girls horror~~ DVD extra.

“You have betrayed me, sir,” Severus said to Horace, deeply grave with only a hint of playfulness. “Or at least, played me most blatantly. Commensurately, I am withholding the white chocolate dipped pineapples.”

“Severus, really,” Horace protested, looking quite taken aback.

“I know,” Severus interrupted him cheerfully, sitting down. “‘It doesn’t work if you do it out loud.’ Evan tells me at least once a fortnight.”

“Really, m’boy,” Horace tried again to plead innocence, but gave up when Albus, just as cheerfully, sat down too.

“Another shandy, Professor? Professor Slughorn, top off your mead?” Rosmerta asked, bustling over. More coolly, she asked Severus, “Anything for you?”

“Cider, if you would be so good,” he said, matching her chill politely and without expression. “Dry, if possible.”

“Oh, _la,_ ” Albus heard her mutter as she headed behind the counter again.

Horace and Albus looked in surprise at Snape, not having ever seen the friendly and very popular publican behave like that. “One of Black’s conquests,” he told them without removing his cold eyes from her back, “although despite his claims I should be astonished if it ever went beyond flirting and slobbering over her hand. I expect she thinks I devour small children and fluffy bunnies in graveyards.”

“You didn’t really want to come and live in Hogsmeade again, Severus, did you,” Albus theorized kindly.

“What I want is rarely relevant,” Severus said, still icy and distant, not removing his eyes as she pulled their drinks. In the same not-really-there tone, he said, “Ah, no unasked additives today. I must make sure always to have high-status companions when drinking here.”

They watched in moderate alarm as he gave Rosmerta a perfunctory and just-civil smile that went nowhere near his eyes, and checked his glass for Merlin knew what before drinking.

Horace tactfully waited until he looked less like an assassin under Imperius before asking, “And how is Evan? Do pass him my thanks again for the lovely basket he sent me for Beltane.”

Severus snorted, looking more present and much thawed, even amused. “I will, but given that his only contributions were the card and the actual basket, I’ll say you’re welcome myself. He’s doing well, of course; Evan always does well.”

“And Miss—I beg your pardon, Mrs. Malfoy, and young Regulus?”

“Hasn’t she had you by?” Severus asked, surprised. “She’s fine; up and about again. I’m sure she’ll be kicking herself when I mention I’ve seen you, but Draco wasn’t thriving at first. She wasn’t thinking about other things.”

“Oh, dear,” Horace tutted. “All serene now?”

“Not the word I would have picked,” Severus said dryly. “Healthy, but not serene. Cacophonous, actually. And Lucius has gone completely berserk now the scare’s over; he still hasn’t stopped attacking people with cigars.” Horace laughed, his waistcoat bouncing gently, and Albus smiled. “Reggie appears to have misplaced his elf,” Severus went on. “His parents say they’re afraid the library ate him—the elf, I mean. Reggie’s awfully upset about the whole business, of course, but he’s getting by otherwise. Oh,” he added, “you’ll appreciate this; Wilkes seems to have found someone who can stand her.”

“You’re so unkind, Severus,” Horace chuckled into his moustache. “She is a lovely young woman, after all.”

“Yes, but my _god_ the squid hands,” Severus said with a plaintive shudder.

“Who is the lucky young thing?”

“Some low-level Ministry wizard, that’s all I know,” the boy shrugged. “And that Evan wasn’t favorably impressed. Which doesn’t surprise me; Evan likes confidence, and Wilkes is best with people who haven’t learned to be suspicious when they’re fawned over and smothered.”

“True, true. I hear that Gilderoy is planning to write a book?” Horace inquired, with a careful delicacy that Albus didn’t quite understand.

“I’ve heard that, too,” Severus agreed, equally careful, with a wincing sort of expression. “Regulus mentioned it, but he didn’t seem be able to make out what it’s going to be about. Theoretically about. One doesn’t need to wonder what—or who—it’ll be _actually_ about. Reg said it was quite,” he stopped, opened and closed his mouth, looked at Albus, and visibly attempted diplomacy. “Quite a good read.” Under his breath, he added, “Taken with an appropriately-sized salt lick.”

“How enterprising of Mr. Lockhart,” Albus suggested, in an enquiring tone.

“Lockhart has always,” Severus said, still as though on eggshells, “been most enterprising, and, ah.” He coughed. “Enthusiastic.”

Horace patted him on the back sympathetically, and said, “I was rather surprised about your owl, you know, Severus.”

“Ev’s a worrywart,” Severus muttered.

“Evan Rosier is a most sensible young wizard, as well you know,” Horace scolded him jovially. “Come across, m’boy.”

Albus watched the boy do that embarrassed re-settling of his shoulders again and glance at him. “If it’s a very private matter,” he said graciously. Sometimes the offer was enough. If not, he’d get the meat of it out of Horace later.

“Oh, he’d just tell you later anyway,” Snape grumped.

“Only every fortnight?” Horace murmured.

Severus made a face at him, and sighed into his cider. After a long moment, he sighed again, evidently making up his mind. He told the cider, “Evan—well, you know Ev, he’s the same with everyone. Takes everyone in stride, just the same. He got curious about how I’m not, and when I told him about it, he about spat his teeth out. Made me promise to come make sure I’m not accidentally doing the kind of dark magic that’ll drive me ‘round the twist and over the cliff. _I_ don’t think it’s magic at all,” he added, with an aggrieved note. “But he said it didn’t sound like a normal Slytherin mind-trick to him, so,” he looked at Horace, “we hoped you’d know if it was something other people have done. If there’s a history.”

“What _is_ a ‘normal Slytherin mind-trick’?” Albus asked Horace, blinking.

“Buggered if I know,” Horace admitted. “I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me a bit more about it, lad.”

“Well, you know,” Severus appealed to him fumblingly, waving a hand as though sifting through the ether for words. “Turning your mind into what you need it to be.”

“Slytherin ‘mind-tricks’ usually involve changing _other_ people’s minds, m’boy,” Horace told him, bemused. He took a deep draught of his mead, and patted it out of his moustache.

“Argh,” Severus said coherently, and jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“Now, now, don’t give up, Severus,” Horace said, patting the narrow back again with a pudgy hand. “I’m only an old potioneer, after all. The Headmaster here, on the other hand… does it sound at all familiar to you, Albus?”

“Well,” Albus said slowly, “Severus hasn’t told us much, Horace. Turning one’s mind into what one needs it to be… I can think of a few things that would describe. Severus, can you say more about it?”

The answer turned out to be _not easily,_ but the boy persevered, struggling on as Albus’s face grew graver and graver. Finally, Albus asked him, as gently as he could, “Severus, is it possible that your home life was… not the happiest?”

Severus stared at him, face a perfect blank again. Very tightly, with perfect enunciation, he let out a stream of incredulous, disgusted profanity that had Albus’s eyebrows trying to fly past his hat and Horace murmuring an appalled I-say! He ended on a snarled, “I _should_ apply again; you blind innocents _cannot be trusted with children._ Why the _hell_ do you ask at this late date, _Headmaster?”_

When Albus had finally accepted that his reproachful look was never until the end of time going to make a dent in the boy’s glacier-burn fury, he said, “Well, my—” and stopped. The poor boy looked angry enough to lose his head and hex him.

In a more businesslike tone, he said, “Because, Severus, what you’ve said reminds me of two things. One of them is a trick that some of the best muggle actors do, and the other is something that happens sometimes to people who… who weren’t treated well as children.”

“Happens,” Severus repeated grimly. Albus’s switch from the grandfatherly seemed to have let him compose himself, although he looked contemptuous and disgusted at the euphemism. “Tell me about them both, please.”

Horace, in a blatant and dishonest move to avoid any upcoming opportunities to be yelled at more, muttered something about never being able to wrap his mind around headology. He scuttled off to settle his tab with Rosmerta, and hurried out.

“Really no pineapple for him after all, I suppose,” Severus said, looking after him with a detached air. “Too bad; _I’m_ sure as hell not eating the sickly stuff.” He looked back at Albus, still with that emotionless face.

“That was an abrupt pivot you did just then, Severus,” Albus noted. “Was it something you decided on?”

Severus nodded. “Can’t listen while shouting,” he noted coolly.

“How did you do it?”

“Just did it.”

“Did you, for example, remind yourself of a time when you’d felt calm?”

“No,” Severus said, still with a face that belonged even more on a statue than a Ravenclaw. “Just put the other things away.”

“Do you feel, right now, like the same person you felt like when you were teaching those girls?”

Severus hesitated. His black eyes, which had turned mirrorlike as he’d pulled himself more or less together, lowered in dispassionate thought. “Depends how you define a person, maybe. No one’s the same with everyone all the time.”

That answer (more or less) ruled out one possibility, and was a great relief. Still, “You’re avoiding the word ‘I,’ I notice.”

“Am I?”

Albus smiled. “Could you call up, right now, the Severus that the girls saw?”

“Not for you,” the boy said tonelessly. “If they were here. And I didn’t have to talk to you. Maybe.”

“Too angry with me?”

“And you don’t call for that that,” Severus agreed remotely.

“So you are, somewhat, in control, but you would have difficulty choosing a feeling style that didn’t make sense. Could you make yourself see me as someone for whom that Severus would be appropriate?”

Severus looked at him for another long moment, cold-eyed, and said, “Not just now. I have no liking for you at the moment. It was the same mindset I used for the interview.”

“So it’s not pretense.”

“No. It’s… spin.”

“Ah,” Albus said, and sat back in his chair, thinking. Grieved as well, because it clearly wasn’t just method acting after all, but mostly he was thinking. He asked, “Could you remember how you felt about me then, and use that to change your ‘mindset’?”

Another long silence. Then, in a different voice, resentful and grudging and just a little amused, “I don’t particularly want to, Professor.”

Albus smiled again. “I can understand that,” he said. “I’m sorry that you feel we’ve failed you, my boy.”

“Be sorry you _did,_ ” Severus said sharply.

He spread his hands, and said, “The school doesn’t interfere with children’s guardians, Severus. That argument was settled when Salazar Slytherin left.”

“Deciding that excluding or kidnapping muggleborn children are not, in fact, the only possible ways to keep our secrets and culture safe is _not the same_ as…”

“What _would_ you have us do?” Albus asked, looking at him intently when he didn’t speak again. “Such children rarely even speak of it, Severus. Even when asked. Even when pressed. What should we do?”

Severus’s mouth tightened, and he breathed out, hard. Angry but present, he looked hard into Albus’s eyes, sparking like flint, and demanded, “If I come up with an answer to that, will you listen?”

“If you come up with a workable answer to that,” Albus pledged, holding his gaze, “I’ll find a post for you on the spot. A part-time position as, oh, Inter-House Liaison, or Student Advocate, or something of the sort, if necessary.”

The boy let out another breath, this one long and shaky, and turned away, tilting his head so his hair fell between them. “See you hold to that,” he threatened, his deep voice stiffly throttled. “Because I _will_ think about it.”

“Do,” Albus told him. He was perfectly aware that he had probably just opened himself to a spy. But that was sure to happen in time, anyway, and this way he could control what was seen and heard. Most of his secrets weren’t kept at the school anyway. And it would be worth almost anything to find a good answer to that piece of hopelessness.

Besides, unless what he was seeing in the boy was a complete lie from start to finish, if Albus couldn’t win him over, he would deserve to be sacked from every post he held for senility.   “But as to yourself, Severus.”

“Ugh,” he said plainly, re-settling his shoulders, jamming the heel of his hand into his eye again and looking back at Albus. His skin was a little blotched around the eyes where he’d been rubbing, and just a little damp in that direction. No cidery tint to the moisture, though (and cider would have been a bad drink choice if this had been a planned ruse), so Albus put it at around a 75% probability that he wasn’t seeing a trick. There was a moment where Severus was glaring _notice that and death_ , but seeing that Albus was chuckling at his reluctant noise, he relaxed and seemed steady again.

“A difficult topic for an… Ebor?” he asked, vaguely remembering the boy’s mother had hailed from not merely Yorkshire but York proper. _Tyke_ had been rude, when last he’d heard it, although language did change so quickly.

Severus shook his head. “The Princes are York and Gloucester as a rule, it’s true,” he allowed. “My family’s Lancashire, embarrassingly enough. I suppose it’s much of a muchness, though.”

“The line does come through the Tudors as well; they were Lancaster,” he pointed out. Severus’s great-grandfather had been entirely wearisome about the fact, back in the dawn of time/their first year.

It had been, goodness, decades since he’d had cause to think about Henry Prince. But that was natural, given what a tedious stuffed shirt his old roommate had been. Unkind to Elphias, too. Albus hadn’t been teaching yet when Severus Prince was at school, and hadn’t known the fellow personally. Knowing nothing more about him than that he’d been a son of Harry’s, Albus’s disgust at learning the man had disowned his only heir—the child of his autumn years—for marrying a muggle had been tempered only by surprise, not disbelief.

Eileen’s muggle-mailed assurances afterwards that she and her young man were managing had been a relief. She’d always been, if anything, too honest, and he’s believed her. From the sound of her son today, something must have changed. Things did, of course. The brief twenty-odd years since her wedding would seem like forever to a young girl like Eileen, were of course longer than Severus had been alive.

“Mam says the family mostly tries to ignore that, apart from some witches in ecstasies over the Gloriana connection,” Severus said wryly. “My being the first Slytherin since the roses joined did us no good whatsoever with my grandfather. White roses, boars and double-handed battle-axes all the way, thank you so very much. Never mind _absolutely everyone involved_ was a Gaunt scion from one marriage or another,” he added, rolling his eyes, “or that the Lancasters threw out enough Slytherin-types to choke an Ironbelly.”

Albus tried hard, when the boy said ‘battle-axes,’ not to look at his nose. His own had long been more misshapen, yes, but it really was a word that anyone who looked like young Snape should avoid at all costs. As were beak, prow, fox, and horse.

Then he blinked. “A Gaunt scion—of course you are,” he said slowly. He’d quite forgotten. Understandable, of course; standard practice had been to smile vaguely while letting Harry’s boasting flow between one’s ears unimpeded. Reminded now, his brain was suddenly afire with _does Tom know that??_

“I’m a mudblood mill shrew who works for my bread and can’t convince myself swearing by a wizard who let himself be trapped in a tree for what we’re told were personal reasons isn’t silly. Although I’d like to think his real reasons are just lost to us. No one who otherwise might give a damn who begat whom six hundred years ago is interested,” Severus said dryly. “Its only effect on my life is to provide me with an excuse for being bloody-minded that the blood-obsessed can be sympathetic instead of disgusted over, if they feel like it.”

Ordinarily, Albus would have discouraged language like that, but the boy’s heavy irony held no hint of shame, self-depreciation, spite, or even humility.

“Professor, while god knows I’d _rather_ talk about Good King Richard—or the Lionheart, for that matter,” he added with a sly little flicker, making Albus laugh, “if I go home without having made a serious stab at sorting myself out, I’ll be on the couch for a week.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Well,” Severus amended, slanting him a wicked look, “I daresay I wouldn’t be _alone_ on the couch, because among our Ev’s many sterling qualities self-denial does not number. But it’s murder on the back, and neither of us is good enough at transfiguration to do much about it.”

Albus coughed and signaled for another shandy. He supposed there were worse ways for the boy to have tried to put his thumb on the power balance between them than by bending cross-generational taboos. That, however, had been just delicate enough that Albus couldn’t easily rebuke him for it, and uncomfortably effective.

Severus wouldn’t know, of course, how much alike the Rosiers, Bagshots, and Grindelwalds tended to look, with their narrow faces, full lips, strong chins, blue to hazel eyes, and waving blond hair that might run anywhere from golden to strawberry. Or why that mattered. Albus closed his eyes in silent thanks, for the thousandth time at least, for the infinitesimal mercy that Gellert had learned from him that mercy mattered: had not, in raising Nurmengard, built for himself an Azkaban.

“Well,” he said, looking back at Severus, who was regarding him uncertainly now (and that, at least, was something), “we mustn’t have that. Severus, you know, of course, that two wrongs don’t make a right?”

“But three lefts do?” Severus parried at once, scooting back in his chair and hunching like a vulture, with an expression exactly like the one Horace had fled from him with. It looked sharper on his thin face, but it really was the same expression. Amazing what people picked up from each other. The body language was different, though. Severus’s face said _run away!_ just as Horace’s had, but he was braced to endure.

“Yes, indeed,” Albus twinkled at him, and he relaxed a little. “I’m glad you said that, my boy, because what I’m going to tell you is similar.”

“All right,” he said slowly, and took a bracing sip of his cider.

“Severus, does the word ‘dissociative’ mean anything to you?”

“Dissociate does,” he said, wary. It would, Albus thought with a tiny mental grimace, to any Slytherin. They were worse than Hufflepuffs for cliquishness. They, of course, would not agree, on the premise that it was only reasonable to change one’s mind about a previous attachment, if other things had also changed.   “Dissociative, no.”

“Have you studied your Paracelsus?”

“Of course.”

“Do you recall his patient who believed her own alter ego was stealing from her?”

“Yes,” Severus said, drawn out, more warily still. “Multiple Personality Disorder, they call that now.[1]”

“Yes. It’s one of the more extreme ways that dissociation can happen; he was the first to describe it, as far as we can know. There are many ways that the mind may try to retreat, or go elsewhere, or bring only a part of itself to the forefront when something can’t be borne, or make the real seem unreal.”

Severus’s eyes flashed to him, not wide but fully open for a split second, and then fell away.

“Let’s call that the first left,” Albus said.

“And the second?” Severus wasn’t looking up.

“You _are_ using dark magic, my boy.”

“Excellent,” Severus muttered audibly. “Mad _and_ self-cursing. What’s the third, go on, hex me.”

“Only two,” Albus told him, “but two may be enough.”

“How, enough?” Severus drawled, not only looking at him now but tipping his chair onto its back legs. It made him look, not liable to fall, but reared back to strike.

“Because not all will-based, unchanneled magic is chaotic,” he said. “If it were, we couldn’t in conscience allow any children to go for years between their first instances of accidental magic and learning to use a wand, as many must. What do you know about the mind magics?”

“I know how to use a pensieve, and I’ve read that Slytherin could see thoughts, or memories, or something of that nature.” He stabilized his chair with a thump, tilted his head and an eyebrow, and commented, “One sometimes gets that impression of you, Professor.”

“That art is called legilimency,” Albus told him, and saw his throat tighten for a moment as its existence was confirmed for him. Albus doubted very much that Severus had gotten that impression from him alone; he knew Tom to be a powerful legilimens. “There are others. I wonder, Severus, if you’ve ever—”

“I was… I was out-of-my-mind tired once,” he said slowly. “Dueling practice with a really good teacher for hours; brutal; I was _done_. Absolutely done in. And a friend came by and wanted me to teach him something I just didn’t know how to talk about. I… I don’t know how else to say it; I just reached out with my eyes and pulled him in,” he said, looking helplessly at Albus. “Pure instinct. It was _awful._ Like we were almost one person for a minute. It was all I could do to show him what he needed and keep us a little apart, and I felt so utterly sick after. Other times, I’ve been able to help people calm down. But I thought that was just… ordinary confidence-based eye-contact hypnosis.”

“You’re going to be quite good, Severus, if you work at it,” Albus said after a moment’s surprised and rather horrified contemplation.   “And it’s a very fortunate thing for you that your first attempt was a generous one.”

“Because heart is key in the Dark Arts,” Severus nodded.

“Exactly so. Legilimency in its common form is largely invasive, and I’m surprised that you in particular produced such a sharing experience.”

“All right,” Severus said warily, “this is me biting. Just because I’m reserved?”

“That could be,” Albus allowed.

It wasn’t the first word he himself would have thought of to describe a boy who seemed to him to spend most of his time teetering in a self-imposed straightjacket on a swaying tightrope between blind implosions of rage and fear and savagely aimed explosions of candor or violence. He could see how a young, stiff-necked wizard like Severus might prefer to call his combination of prey-animal instincts and the unrelenting tension of that precarious balance ‘reserve,’ though.

“You will have realized, no doubt, that you’re relatively powerful, as wizards of your age go; that spells and potions take shape for you more easily than those of others and are stronger, that you find wandless or silent spells easier than some, and tire less from them. That magic seems present enough for you that you can sense and work with it with relative ease, where you can make sense of it.”

“I notice half-bloods often are relatively powerful,” Severus said, with another one of those sly flickers. Of course, his friends would have made sure he was well-versed in _Nature’s Nobility_ ; he would know about Albus’s muggleborn mother.  

A more interesting question was, did he know about Tom’s father? He wouldn’t have learned it from a book, but Tom, always grasping about for loyalty, might have told another half-blood the truth in secrecy to forge a connection. Just as he let the purebloods believe what he needed them to believe, to keep their respect.

“And for those with deep reserves, just as with children,” Albus said, “the magic we don’t intend to use often bends itself to our deepest, or most secret, or strongest wishes.”

Severus thought about that, and it didn’t take him long. “You’re suggesting,” he said, “that my magic is responding to my direction—but not my conscious direction—to let me… to let me obscure as much of myself as I think I need to? No—as much as I _feel_ I need to. Yes?”

“That discipline,” Albus told him, “is called occlumency.”

“It’s a _discipline,_ ” Severus repeated, eyes jerking to his, huge with a crushing relief, fastening onto the word like a lifeboat.

“At its simplest, it can be a strong wall against invasion,” Albus said. “And I must tell you that yes, I can, when I try, see thoughts, or, rather memories. And that I believe I could, if I tried, see yours. But you would notice it, Severus, as others might not. There’s a smoke-screen behind your eyes I would have to sweep away or otherwise get past. A legilimencer would have to be very subtle indeed, or you would feel it.”

He didn’t have to watch as closely as he’d thought he would to find out whether that struck home for Severus, whose mind he never had reached through to. With a rather sick look, Severus said, very slowly, “Yes. I think I would.” He looked up at Albus again. This time his eyes said, very clearly and with intent, _and have, and will: what you tell me will be heard._

Albus nodded, holding his gaze, showing his understanding. “But even that shield isn’t the simple wall I described,” he said. “Never mind these other things you’re doing. And, Severus, do you know the Centipede’s Dilemma?”[2]

“…Oh, _hell,_ ” the boy groaned at once. He buried his head in his arms on the table, just like Minerva.

“I take it that’s a yes,” Albus noted lightly. He put his hand on the boy’s wiry shoulder, and said, “Severus, do you remember what I said about my window?”

One black eye peeked up at him, doleful but alert.

“I meant it,” he said. “Is there anywhere you absolutely need to be for the rest of the day?”

A slow, wary headshake.

“Come back to the castle with me,” Albus told him. “We’ll make a start right away.”

Looking as though an enormous chunk of this proposal did not make sense to him, the Slytherin asked, “Why would you… you’ve decided,” he changed his question dubiously, “that you owe me for ’76?”

Albus was pleased that he’d internalized his vow enough not to even try to say Lupin’s name in public in connection with it, even to his bonder. “Would it help you to think of it that way?”

“Not if it isn’t true,” Severus told him, blunt again.

“Severus,” Albus said, shaking his head with a half-smile, “why did you teach those girls that protection?”

“Er… because their prefects are largely useless and they’re going to need—Oh,” Severus finished after a moment, and raised his head. He dug into his robes for a few sickles to leave on the table, and rose. “Well,” he said, brightly rueful, “that’s thoroughly humiliating, but, as the man said, take advantage wherever you can.”

“If you say so, my boy,” Albus chuckled. Leaving his own coin, he gave Rosmerta a cheerful wave as he ushered his student out.

* * *

[1] _Now_ it’s called Dissociative Identity Disorder.

[2] A centipede was happy – quite!  
Until a toad, in fun,  
Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?"  
This raised her doubts to such a pitch  
She fell exhausted in the ditch,  
Not knowing how to run.  
—original authorship uncertain/contested

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : the fallout.
> 
>  **Credit** to [Trouble at Mill](http://www.troubleatmill.com/speak.htm) for almost always, as in this case, being the source of Severus's lapses into dialect and such. Their phrase was 'spat his dummy out,' but Severus didn't think Evan was being infantile and besides, 'dummy' is one of those words he doesn't say even when he means 'idiot' rather than 'pacifier.' It's just not him. Also thanks to Ebony for confirming my suspicion that Brits do not, in fact, say 'had a cat.' Which is rather a pity IMO—although probably does cut down on the opportunities for homicide by Minerva, if you consider that a plus.
> 
> Headology, of course, would be patented to Granny Weatherwax if she could be having with that sort of thing. All that business with papers and long words and that is wizard nonsense. When you're a witch (or at least when you're Granny), everyone just KNOWS. 'Cause if you ain't got respect, you ain't got a thing. And if you do, someone will come out and build you that swing if you wants one, and probly bring a ham or some old clothes with some wear left in 'em for good measure.
> 
> 'The man' is probably Salazar Slytherin within the story, but IRL that's the title of a mazoku yaoi doujinshi, and if you do not know what ALL of those words mean, you probably don't want to know more than you already do.


	39. Undisclosed, Later

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus faces the Dark Lord for the first time after allying with Dumbledore.

"Do I understand you to say," Lord Voldemort asked, almost faint behind his cool poker-face, "that you've conned Albus Dumbledore into volunteering to train you to conceal your mind from his gaze? This afternoon."

"Well, he thinks he's just stopping me going messily mad, of course," Severus said with his usual unnecessary punctiliousness, looking up at Voldemort from where he knelt. "And it's just as traditional to use patronizing as greedy arrogance. I hope I did right, my Lord? It is a risk, I realize, but, after all, you haven't told me your plans, even the ones you have for me. All I know for sure that anyone's doing is perfectly legal socializing and politicking. And it is an in. His self-image as a kindly and helpful grandfather seemed to be making the opening; I thought I had better strike before it passed."

"No," the Dark Lord agreed, making sure not to sound as stunned as he felt. "No, my own, it was well done." Rallying, he said sternly, "A considerable improvement on your last show of initiative."

"Thank you, my lord. He puts an emphasis on meditation and the like," Severus frowned.

Voldemort took note that, with his mind on business, he'd barely seemed to register either the praise or the censure. A far cry from the novice who'd pulled down a crucio for his lack of confidence, or simply the effect of having a clear task? Something to keep an eye on, either way.

"But if I'm to step up my exposure to him, I'd rather have anything more substantial under my belt that there is to be had. Do you know of anything I should be learning, sir?"

The Dark Lord considered. He hadn't expected to get an agent anywhere near the old fart anytime soon, particularly not after the debacle at the Hog's Head the previous month. Snape had been quite right, of course; it would be nearly impossible for even someone Dumbledore trusted to take him out and survive the experience in any meaningful way.

Snape was getting unnervingly resourceful disturbingly fast. It might be as well to eliminate them both before he became too knowledgeable, too competent, before he had the chance to develop into a wild card. Voldemort could see to it, if necessary, that he didn't live to be questioned.

But there was that prophecy, and Voldemort believed the little pedant completely on that score. He was without the imagination, the necessary type of stupidity, or the motive to attempt that story as a ploy. The way it had spooked him, too, that head-first dive into old scrolls as though knowledge solved everything and was more important than what he'd been told to do, had been absolutely and reassuringly typical.

And the only thing the Dark Lord was certain the prophecy meant was this: Dumbledore might be his least favorite person still living, even his arch-enemy, if one were in a melodramatic mood, but he was not Voldemort's greatest threat. And while the uncrowned king of the wizarding world (for now, for now!) lived, everything innocent and thoughtless and pathetic and self-satisfied and self-righteous would flock to either Voldemort's banner or his.

Take Dumbledore out, and this weapon (or Champion of the Light, or whatever the prophecy's other locus turned out to be) might end up anywhere, black glass on the floor in the dark to be stepped on by the Dark Lord's bare foot. Let the old fool live, then, and train Voldemort's soldier for him.

But Severus was young, and far too malleable. He'd escaped being lulled while at school, but he'd been uncontrolled and unprepossessing trouble-bait, then. Now he'd be the sole focus of the old man's eye, encouraging Dumbledore to like and court him. He'd be getting the full effect of what the young Tom had seen was a charisma the equal of his own, although he'd never been taken in by it himself. And though Severus was known to scorn sentiment he was hungry for such ephemera, as Tom had never been.

In this case, Lord Voldemort decided, the obvious course was the right one. Let Severus learn from Dumbledore, yes, but not from Dumbledore alone. Voldemort would keep his soldier a step ahead of his enemy, although not so far ahead as to convince Dumbledore the pathetic, scraggly black lamb didn't need him.

"I shall see to it you have access to all the likely family libraries," he announced, and smiled indulgently as the boy's public face was momentarily trampled to death by a stampede of exhilarated greed before Severus, abashed and rather red but not quite ashamed, pulled himself together. "Young Regulus's should be of use to you, certainly, but there are others. Regulus has also been learning occlumency, although Bellatrix reports his progress as unsatisfactory."

He noted with interest the complete lack of surprise. Not even a flicker, not at any of the three pieces of information he'd just doled out. Perhaps, then, some of Bella's rancor was less blood-based and idealistic than she claimed, and, while still irrelevant to his interests, should grate on his nerves less. "You are excused from our dueling practices for this study for the moment; you and he are to practice together."

She also claimed that the self-indulgent Black brat had been moping over his dead elf to the point of uselessness. And, of course, she herself could be no pleasant teacher, given the mood she'd been in of late. He would give her the training of the Crouch boy, who needed to be brought in too deeply to run back to his father, and quickly, and tell her that…

Yes, he'd tell her that her cousin's laxitude had annoyed him, that this reassignment was Regulus's punishment. Meanwhile, it might be a renewing change for Black, and the gormless wet blanket would be a harmless partner for the Dark Lord's tight-wound bundle of nerves to practice with and on. If there were some balancing-out of either energy or calm between them, so much the better.

"Return to me in a week," he finished, "and I will assess your progress. Learn quickly, Severus, and 'learn slowly.'"

"Yes, my lord," Severus said, with one of his formal nods. He turned his face up again with a wry look, and asked, "Shall I start now, or do we still practice tonight? I'm up for it, if it's your wish. As I'm sure you'll understand, sir, after today, I have a lot of adrenaline to burn."


	40. #18 Dye Urn, That Evening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> AdrenalineHigh!Severus Orders Dinner. Emphasis on 'orders.'

"Oh, lor'," Evan groaned when Severus came in covered in sweat and exhaustion-tremors again. "Was it bad? Run you a bath? What did Sluggy say?"

Spike walked straight to him, and despite the way he was shaking, his eyes were clear and calm. He put his hands on Evan's shoulders, and then on his face, and rested their foreheads together. "Evander, my brilliant, O Best Beloved," he said—with an ironic smile, being congenitally incapable of saying something like that without one. "I think it just possible we may, with vigilance and effort, live."

"…You didn't yesterday?" Evan asked, raising an eyebrow, only a little at the Kipling.

"Oh my dear god and also Merlin and Salazar, Rowena, Circe, Hecate, Livia, and any bloody other anyone living, dead, sainted, or divine you care to name, so very incredibly _no_ ," Spike told him with an optic-nerve-threatening eye-roll. He kissed Evan soundly, chastely, before stepping away. Evan could feel him buzzing under his skin.

"I want a shower," he told Evan over his shoulder. "Owl us something dreadful to eat. Oh, and send out those pineapples for Slughorn, will you? I never gave them to the oversized weasel in person, so unless you want to eat them we might as well curry favor. Since the pineapples are too desiccated to curry _them_. Let's get a fresh one tomorrow to grill."

"You're telling me what happened!" Evan called after him, shaking his head as he started a note to Spike's favorite chippy. The shop probably, he thought as he wrote it, thought the two of them were already dead, it had been so long.

"I'm telling you under that memory spell!" Spike called back from the bathroom. "After I try a modifier!"

"I'm joining you in the shower?" he asked hopefully.

"I won't be in long, Ev. _FOOD_."

"Then don't take it standing;" he warned, actually concerned about this, considering the way Severus had been nearly shaking, "you'll fall on your face."

"FOOD!"

"Food, right. Lots of food?" Evan asked, starting to grin as the water went on.

"YES."

"Peas? Scraps?"

"Pickles."

" _Of_ course."

" _All the pickles. Really all of them I mean this._ "

"All of them? Even pumpkins?"

"Those ARE NOT pickles, they DO NOT count, we are NOT AT HOME to desperate and unimaginative attempts to have Just One Menu Item That's Different From Muggles For No Damn Reason But Catering To (glub) Snobs, as if muggles can do heat-preservation charms to keep the food crispy, and it's not as if the pickled eggs are chicken eggs, they're _tiny_ , ought to bloody well be distinction enough for anybody, absolutely _ludicrous—_ "

"Didn't think so," he smiled, weeks and weeks of worry sliding off him. "Malt vinegar or—"

"SO MUCH OF THAT."

"At once, Highness," Evan laughed. Strolling downstairs to their block of flats' owlery with his money pouch and the box of revolting pineapples he noticed that, for the first time in some time, he was noticing the stars out the window.

* * *

**End Book II**

Ct'd same bat channel pretty soon, although there will be at least a couple weeks of break for RL stuff.

AND NOW AS PROMISED (I think I promised it here...): [DVD BONUS!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1465822)


	41. INTERLUDE: Malfoy Manor, Wiltshire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone in Slytherin had hoped everyone else would, on moving in with their respective crazy SOs, change them for the better. Including Severus's roommate, who is only not-ROFLing at this incredibly stupid expectation because of being worried out of his mind. 
> 
> Which is, yes, okay, directly related to Severus not wanting his picture painted _(really really at all please god noooooo leave me alooooone no srsly why are you doing this to me go away I will go out the window put that brush AWAY, Mister; I have a wand you know!)_. But that doesn't mean Evan is _actually_ out of his mind. Really!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter neither opens Book III nor resumes a normal posting schedule. Things have been pretty hectic for me lately, with the result that I have a new job. _INTERACTING WITH PEOPLE_. :O I'm gonna need some time to acclimate, at least another couple weeks, maybe a few. Because it's going to be a fun job, but until I get into the swing I expect to be pretty much chronically exhausted—and, delightfully, also sleep-deprived for at least the first week. (sigh) 'Cause that's how I roll. And toss, and turn. :D
> 
> But since I've established that our lad S.O.S was Beltane-begot, I just _couldn't_ not post. Happy Mayday!

"What do you do," Evan asked moodily, "when you want to Imperius Luke?"

Narcissa blinked at him, halfway between amused and wary. "Is that a trick question, darling?"

Evan sighed, disconsolate. Spike was probably too bullheaded to be successfully compelled, even if Evan was seriously inclined to try. He wouldn't have traded with her for Lucius, a vault full of diamonds, and the chance to talk to Da Vinci for a week (especially not for Lucius, who usually meant well, but _no_ ), but he did sometimes wonder what it would be like to live with someone who was easier.

She patted his hand sympathetically, and said quizzically, "I thought you and Severus had been much more relaxed recently. Has something happened?"

"Oh, well, not really…" He eyed the plate of little sandwiches glumly. The urge to shred them all into tiny wet crumbs was so powerful that the ghost of Linky's sternness, lowering down at him from his childhood (and last Sunday), was barely enough to keep his hands still. "He's just the absolute _worst_."

"At what?" Narcissa asked, now evidently torn between more amused and really alarmed. "Fashion? Tact?"

"Actually, he's getting better at that, it's terrifying," Evan told her, perking up briefly. Terrifying wasn't quite what he meant, but one tended to use sedate language around Narcissa, even when completely confident that she knew what was really meant by it.

"Really?" she asked, skeptical and delighted.

"I don't think he's ever going to make it look much more natural than Luke does," Ev elaborated, scrupulous, "but there's something… hypnotic. I haven't dared ask who he's mimicking."

They eyed each other knowingly, each thinking of the mostly-a-man who was still quite distinguished-looking, and certainly still had both his body and his oldest friends (for lack of a better word) hadn't noticed yet that his eyes were a ruddier brown than they'd been in his childhood, except as a scarcely-noticed feeling that something was off when the light caught them _just_ so.

Narcissa asked, "What, then?"

Evan wrestled with a ridiculous sense of disloyalty for a moment, then burst out petulantly, "The _sprog_ is a better sitter than Spike is!"

Narcissa burst into chiming laughter while he ranted, in what was really an almost Severus-like manner.

No, that was flattering himself. Spike on a rant was captivating, enjoying himself to the fullness of his vitality, open and expressive as he would never let himself be with other emotions, casting his visions across the grubby canvas of the world and stabbing his wand enthusiastically (if crossly) at the many discrepancies. Ev was just whinging. He sounded more like Reggie in a pet than Spike, and he knew it.

"Well, really, darling," Narcissa giggled, making an attempt to pull herself back together, "I don't know what you expected. Why does he want a portrait anyway?"

"Oh, he doesn't, he does not, he _does not_ ," Evan said, automatically checking his fingers to make sure there wasn't any paint on them before scrubbing at his eyes. "And I expected, well, this, but I thought he'd get over it. I thought I had him, maybe not convinced, but by now I thought I at least had him ready to _entertain the possibility_ that he isn't an eyesore."

"Well, he is, you know," Narcissa said, raising an eyebrow. "And it's a terrible pity, because he cleans up well enough."

"Please don't tell him that," he said flatly. Then he looked at her face, closed his eyes tightly in a sort of pain, and amended, "Anymore."

"But it's so _vexing,_ " she exclaimed. "He has such wonderful bones, apart from that nose, and he's even grown into that! And look what he does with them! I had hoped," she added with a sort of hurt severity, "that you would—"

"And," he cut across her, "you hoped Rodolphus would calm your sister down, and she hoped Lucius would make you more eager for her sort of games, and everyone and their pet kneazles hoped you could get Luke to relax and stop trying so hard to look suave. Has any of that happened? That sort of thing doesn't happen. I'm happy with the bloke I've got, coz. Why I nabbed him. He can dress himself as neurotically as he likes. I just wish he'd stop squirming and looking like a pathetically tortured martyr eying an incoming whip when I'm trying to paint him," he sighed.

And then added thoughtfully, "Of course, I wouldn't mind if he thought putting timed glamours on all my waistcoats was less entertaining. The attention to detail is impressive, mind, and it does make a good conversation piece, but it's a bit uncomfortable, knowing one's clothes might cease to go together at any moment."

She gave him a look that suggested she was firmly on Spike's side in all matters relating to Evan's waistcoats, but insisted, "Well, if he'd just put in a bit of _effort_ , it would make such a nice change that everyone would tell him how striking he looks, and then he'd—"

"Assume we were all making fun of him and vanish into the stillroom for a month with his shoulders around his ears," Evan finished for her.

She looked like she wanted to argue, but she also looked like she couldn't. "Who wants him painted, then, if he doesn't?"

"Me," he answered grimly. "He's more relaxed because he feels better able to face trouble, not because he's in less of it."

Her eyes pulled widely to him, and her hands stilled. "You sound like you think his _life…"_

Evan shrugged uneasily. "I don't think anything, except that I trust his danger sense. He came reeling home a few days ago, over the moon, and it was, 'Evan, I think we might just, with some luck, live,' and all. And I asked, this is a new opinion? And he laughed at me quite a lot, Narcissa, and took about half an hour to finish saying 'yes.' He was so relieved I just got caught up with him, but when I'd slept on it…"

"Well, Severus has always been jumpy," she said nervously.

"That's just it," Evan said, flat. "He's not jumpy. He doesn't jump when he thinks Potter's stalking him. He's very, very focused, Narcissa. It's scaring the scales off me."

His eyes were on the sandwiches, but he could feel hers on him. Eventually, she asked, tentatively, "Can you tell me…?"

He told her what he could. Depressingly, this wasn't much less than he knew himself: that while Severus's interview with Dumbledore for the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at the school had been a disaster (he did know more than he was saying about that), now they were expecting to spend a significant amount of time together, and that the Dark Lord was very pleased about it.

"And he said he and Reg are supposed to be working together now," he said. He still wasn't sure how to take that.

Narcissa was: her expression lightened noticeably. "But that's wonderful!" she exclaimed.

"Is it?"

"Bella has been driving Reggie so hard," she explained, choosing her words carefully. More naturally, "And he's been terribly upset about his elf, poor pet."

Evan frowned. "I haven't seen him recently, come to think of it."

"I don't think he's left the house all week, except when Bella's made him," she said, rolling her eyes a little. "Do make sure Severus schedules all their meetings for evening, will you? My sister is so very zealous in her devotions."

"Not much choice, is there," he assured her, droll. "He does work all day, you know."

She slid him a guilty look. Which was appropriate, although Spike being overscheduled wasn't her fault. Then, rallying, "Well, I suppose we shall simply have to rely on you as our sitter, then. Our babysitter, that is. Godmama."

"Isn't that," Evan drawled, raising an eyebrow at her, "what your elves are for?"

Across the room, the elf Granddad had given them for a wedding present looked up from rocking Draco's bassinet and gave them a grin that looked, to Evan, so overcaffeinated that if it wasn't illegal it ought to be.

"Or not," he amended judiciously, and the elf drooped.


	42. Book III: July 1980: Hogwarts Grounds (Week I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Albus and Severus start working on their working relationship, and Occlumency. One goes better than the other, nirvana ≠ strained turnips, and 'it's Greek to me' is the understatement of the year.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Story Notes** : Parts of this chapter will make more sense to those who have read _The Wicket Gate_ particularly Ch 6: June 10.
> 
>  **Book Notes** : July is quite a long book. More chapters will cover less time.
> 
>  **Process Notes** : Due to some RL changes, I'm afraid we have to wave goodbye to twice a week posts. Sorry about that.

**Book III: July** **1980**   
_Week I_ **  
**

Hogwarts Grounds, By the Lake

 

"I hear a great deal of your friend Lucius, Severus," Albus said.

Severus blinked, queried, "Luke?" and then looked like he wanted to punch himself in the face. "I mean, do you?"

"Oh, yes," Albus said, trying not to smile—or, at least, not to let his smile be too obviously about the nickname. "He seems to be quite over his habit of assaulting people with tobacco."

"It's too bad, really," Severus said reflectively. "The pressurized part of the excitement's worn off, but I don't think he quite knows what to do next."

"Perhaps one of his many new friends can give him some tips," Albus suggested cheerfully.

"As long as he doesn't take them from his father," Severus said darkly, neatly avoiding talking about Malfoy's many new friends, and then gave Albus an _oops you might like him_ look. "But of course you'll know Mr. Malfoy well."

"You always have seemed to think us more heavily involved in our students' lives than we are," Albus noted, smiling a little. There was no need to press on the subject of Malfoy; it was enough that he had been raised as someone they might talk about in future.

"Maybe," Severus said, sitting back on his palms. They were outside; Severus had rather grimly insisted that they meet under the beech tree near the lake, no, not any tree, that one. Albus wasn't sure he was looking forward to discovering why. "Or maybe I just think you ought to be."

"Ah, 'ought.'"

"It's not as if it's a day school, sir. You're in loco parentis most of the year. _Ought_ not, then, some parenting to take place? Honestly, the place is about three steps up from Lord of the Flies."

"I'm delighted you think us so well advanced," Albus said courteously.

"Observant of you," Severus fired back, not in the least flustered, "as the assessment is decidedly on the charitable side."

Albus looked at him for a moment in surprise, and then started to chuckle.

Severus slid him one of those sly, self-depreciating half-smiles after his own moment of surprise at not being punished. "Let me guess: that usually works?"

"It does, in fact," Albus said lightly. "However did you come to be immune?"

"What, to the poisoned cordial? I'm Slytherin; it's everyone's favorite. Your tone control is masterly, though," he added, eying Albus with critical approval. "And I didn't catch a hint of a sneer. I understand that when China was the world's acme of civilization, it was considered a masterstroke of civility for one's target not to realize they'd been insulted until three days later. An art form as demanding as poetry. Did you study there?"

"My goodness, I haven't blushed so much since Pomona said she liked my new socks," Albus said cheerfully.

"Do I want to know why Professor Sprout was looking at your socks?" Severus asked, looking not scandalized but very much like he wanted to bleach out his brain.

Albus laughed. "I make them, you know," he confided, lifting the hem of his robes enough to display the very cheery ones he had on. "It's most relaxing. I daresay, Severus," he added, raising his voice slightly, as Severus had gone thoroughly devilish and started to softly whistle a pawky song about ankles,[1] "that you could use a—where on earth did you learn that?" he had to stop and ask, bemused. "I can't think when last I passed a music hall."

"Oh, it used to be amateur hour down the pub all the time before the mill closed," Severus answered, a crooked ghost of a smile tugging his face almost wistful. "Back before everyone only came to drown their sorrows. Me da were a fan; his da met his mam when she were a living doll down t'Malt Cross in Nottingham." He coughed a little, and his throat tightened visibly. When he went on, his voice was entirely public-school again. Albus felt this was rather a shame. "You were saying, Professor?"

"That I imagine you could use a relaxing hobby."

"Brewing is usually relaxing," Severus said defensively. "Not the experimental stuff, but most of the everyday ones."

"There is a great deal of thinking involved in it, though, wouldn't you say?"

"Depends on the potion, I suppose."

"Timing, monitoring the heat, maintaining your stirring patterns—"

"The point, sir, while we're young?" Severus asked dryly.

"Ah, flattery!"

"Just trying not to be unnecessarily rude, Professor," Severus replied brightly, all innocence.

"A valiant effort, I'm sure," Albus kindly lauded him. Severus grinned evilly and unrepentantly, making him laugh. "But do you have some pastime that doesn't ask you to think?"

Severus looked at him for rather a long moment, brow furrowed, blinking once or twice. "Quidditch sometimes?"

"Hardly serene, I would have thought…?"

"Well, no… we read to each other," he said finally, both dubious and defensive, eyes narrowed. One could very nearly see the lashing tail. "At home."

"Words, Severus," Albus pointed out, trying not to smile.

"Words, words, words," Severus muttered, hunching, and thought some more. "I suppose you'd say cooking is the same as brewing?"

"Alas."

"Suppose not, then."

"I'd like you to try to find one," he instructed. "Something so mindless that your mind empties."

Severus shot him an appalled look. "Like _what_?"

"Oh, any number of things!" Albus assured him. "I've heard of swimming, or looking into a candle, counting breaths, lace-making… I suppose chopping cabbage might work well for you, only you'd end up with such a lot of cabbage…"

"Just to empty the mind?" Severus demanded, incredulous.

Albus paused. "'Just'?" he repeated. They looked at each other for another long moment. Albus had the distinct sense of trying to speak English to an extraterrestrial who had, since arriving on Earth, learned only the carrying whistles of Silbo Gomero. "Do you mean you're able to empty your mind already?"

"I don't _like_ to," Severus said, with an uncomfortable shrug. "But sometimes it's the only thing one can do."

"Would it be all right," Albus said carefully, "if I," he touched his temple, "observed you doing it, to make sure we're talking about the same thing."

Severus hunched, and his hair fell forward over his face. After a moment, he raised his head, mouth tight. "'All right's not the phrase I would have used, but I suppose there's no progressing without it."

"How long will you need?"

Severus raised a _what are you **talking** about_ eyebrow at him. He looked up at the tree, and his mouth curled into nothing like a smile, cold and bitter as ashes. "Don't need the assist," he said to it sourly, "but thanks all the same." Then his eyes unfocused and his face slackened. He collapsed to the ground, fingers curled awkwardly in the grass, all his strings cut.

"Oh, dear," Albus said aloud. "No, no, Severus, that's not at all what I meant. Please sit up."

Severus didn't. In the end Albus had to summon a vial of smelling salts from the castle. He got glared at indignantly when Severus realized what he'd used (as though being sneezed on hadn't been chastisement enough), and said sternly, "Then don't do that again."

"You told me to!" the boy protested indignantly.

"Severus, I assure you, whatever you did just then is not what anyone will _ever_ mean when they tell you 'empty your mind.' The aim is nirvana, not steamed vegetable."

"You said empty it, I emptied it," Severus said mutinously.

"Into the fire, by the look of it."

"Just the cellar. But with a good lock."

"You use a memory palace?"

"A what?"

Albus sighed and stood, suddenly missing his old Transfigurations classroom with its very useful textbooks and blackboard. He suspected that before long he would have a full understanding of why Perenelle, his own teacher, had told him that almost no one took on more than one mind-magic student in a lifetime. "I'd like you to work out a way to tidy everything away instead of stuffing all of you under the floorboards. Come into the library and we'll see what we can find to give you ideas."

"Sorry," Severus said sullenly, getting to his feet.

Albus looked at him, frowning, and rested his hands on the wiry shoulders. "Are you being deliberately difficult, Severus?" he asked softly, sad to see this easy dive into feeling blamed.

"I am not," the boy snapped, offended but not surprised to be asked.

"Then don't apologize," Albus said, and closed his hand on the suddenly bewildered Slytherin's arm for a moment, encouraging. "You go too far, too fast, and I came expecting to teach someone who wouldn't know where to start. That's not your fault. You did what you thought I had instructed, and although you didn't want to, you put your heart into the doing, without stinting. What more could anyone ask?"

Severus stared at him, and now Albus had the sense that _he_ was the space creature who could speak only in whistles. "I… that is… but I _didn't_ do what you _really_ —"

"True!" Albus said heartily, and began herding him towards the castle. "We should have made sure we understood each other before you tried, you're quite right. In future, when you think I'm asking you to do something dreadful, we'll make sure we've been speaking the same language, and that, if we are, I know how to pull you out. And otherwise, I think, we need say no more about it."

"All right," Severus said, still looking at him, confounded, as at an alien.

* * *

[[1]](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1080566/chapters/new#_ftnref1) I confess I was thinking about _Oom-pah-pah_ from Oliver! here, although it was made up for the play and wasn’t a real music-hall song. Catchy, though!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Albus visits an old student. He discovers that TV was weird in the eighties and that that Severus's geek-on did not come from where you'd expect.


	43. Spinner's End, Nelson, Lancashire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Albus visits an old student. He discovers that TV was weird in the eighties and that that Severus's geek-on did not come from where you might expect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** for discussion of past domestic abuse, laissez-faire management style, and bigotry including but not limited to homophobia. Also Regional Delicacies and depictions of actual 1980's commercials. ** _All of these are real warnings I am not messing around with this chapter._**
> 
> (Okay, maybe a little about the commercials. But only a little!)
> 
> Be aware that victims of domestic abuse often do not see their situations in the same way that other people would. Those concerned about triggers or who can't stand to hear abuse treated with anything less than full condemnation may want to stop reading or do a search down for 'brave' when Eileen rubs her arms.
> 
> Character opinions are, as always, entirely their own: please do not assume any of them are speaking for me. Ever. But especially not here.

"Good morning," Albus smiled affably to the muggle who had opened the door of the soot-choked brick end terrace. "Is this the Snape residence?" He knew perfectly well that it was, and if he hadn't been sure of the address, the course features in front of him would have been telling enough.

Severus looked quite like his father in some respects. They shared the hooked nose, although the father's had been broken more often or healed less well. Albus thought he could see a hint of Severus's hollow jaws under the jowls before him. Their foreheads were the same, except that Severus had Eileen's widow's peak and his father's hairline looked as though it had begun to recede before she had put the right things into his tea. They shared the inappropriately long-lashed half-moon eyes that would have made a softer type of face stunning.

The muggle was taller than Dumbledore, who therefore had to wonder whether his student had gotten enough to eat in his early years, and just as broad in the shoulder. Although Tobias Snape might have had a Beater's build once, his body had sagged from heavyset into a beer bloat, with roughened, reddened skin. He must have looked more hawkish even than his Chaser son in his youth, though, with those nearly golden eyes, despite the broader face and far more solid build: a buzzard to Severus's merlin.

He had been eying Albus just as closely as Albus had him, and was scowling. Albus thought, in a blithe sort of way, that he was rather miffed: he had taken such care to wear a suit. It wasn't even in a particularly bright color, and there were no patterns or embroidery on anything but his scarf. A wasted effort, it appeared. Ah, well.

"You collecting for sommat?" the man asked suspiciously.

Albus carefully did not look at the dingy streets with their grey washing lines. No one with an iota of common sense would waste time trying to collect money here for any cause that the locals didn't already care passionately about, or even in that case expect more than the equivalent of a handful of sickles after a full day's work. "My name is Professor Dumbledore, Mr. Snape," he said affably. "Your wife was once a student of mine, and I've come to visit her."

"You're one of _that_ lot," the man gathered, his scowl going thunderous. He hesitated, then said shortly. "Ellie in't in. Could be an hour or more. Never came before, reckon you can wait."

"Very kind of you," Albus said graciously, and stepped past him into the house. Snape (not unexpectedly) looked as though that wasn't at all what he had meant, but only scanned the street (presumably for curious neighbors) before closing the door tightly behind them.

The sitting room was small, cramped with book-cases stuffed with bottles and packets, but full of light. There were what looked like home-made beeswax candles and oil-burning lamps on every surface, the windows were scrubbed to diamond transparency, and the wallpaper was so white it was nearly blue. There was an ugly, boxy contraption with a glass screen, some black dials, and two metal rods like a bug's antennae sitting from the shabby sofa. It was plugged into the wall with a thick wire, but Albus couldn't see any other outlets in the room.

"Have a drink if you like," Snape offered grudgingly. "Lass won't have aught but apple juice in t'house."

"I am passionately fond of apple juice," Albus assured him, having no actual objection to it. Even Pomona and the elves couldn't coax enough citrus out of the chilly Hogsmeade ground to keep the school steadily supplied with orange juice or limonade, alas. Trying to both keep an orchard and keep the centaurs out of it had also proven problematic, historically. Whereas Hagrid was (speak it quietly) a true sorcerer with his pumpkin patch. It was actually easier on the budget to spice the pumpkin juice, thin and tasteless on its own, than to buy enough fruit juice for the students, or enough fruit to make it. And it was nourishing. Still, a change was always welcome.

"Bloody odd passion," Snape muttered, looking askance at him. He shrugged after a moment of getting nothing back but an affably expectant smile, and stepped through a door to emerge again a moment later with a pitcher and two chipped but very clean glasses. He poured for them both and then, evidently considering his duty done, turned one of the knobs on the boxy device before sitting down.

Albus watched in fascination as small pictures of people put on a sort of a play on the glass screen. He had been to the cinema, but that had been grand, and treated with respect. This was anything but.

There was an extraordinarily curly-haired man in a brown frock-coat and a scarf that looked like something Pomona would wear, and a charming young lady with an Alice in Wonderland face and matching blond hair. There were also some moving devices like enormous, living saltshakers. They did not seem to be friendly.

He nearly argued himself into joining Snape in his viewing, on the grounds that it would be cultural and illuminating. In conscience, however, he couldn't pass up the chance to snoop around a room his once and future student had grown up in.

The most noticeable thing about the place, to the mundane eye, was the wealth of bookcase. Most of the shelves were stuffed with potions ingredients, all devoid of overt magic, most of the sort easily picked up in the woods or grown in even the most muggle of gardens.

Only one shelf had actual books. A few were thick nonfiction, herblore and the like. The rest were thin, battered paperbacks whose titles were heavy on words like Infinity, Doorway, Midnight, Sun, and Machine. He saw a number of made-up words like Martian, Godwhale and Ringworld, as well. Many of them were, for some reason, missing their front covers.

Not confined to his mundane eyes, Albus found runes everywhere, scratched into wood, painted on wallpaper with invisible inks made of lemon juice, onion juice, white vinegar, always a choice that worked well with their meanings. A few, all Futhark and Ogham, were in a feminine hand that Albus would have guessed for Eileen's even if it hadn't dredged up a vague and ancient memory of Transfiguration essays past. The vast majority (and all the Chinese ones) were in what must have been the cramped, spiky writing of which every one of Severus's professors had complained.

Neither the candles nor the oil lamps, he could see, would ever burn out, nor need replacing. There was a cleaning and replenishing charm on the pitcher, as well. Albus noted that it was written so as to be activated when its bottom touched something very cold, making the pitcher unlikely to refill itself in front of muggles.

The ceiling pulled humidity upwards and turned the damp to pure oxygen, would stop both sound and leaks getting through from upstairs. The floor repelled particles well enough to make cleaning it easy, although not unnecessary. There were wards against vermin and human intruders and fire in every corner, and around the door and window.

Charms for peace and harmony had been so savagely scratched into the wood of the sofa and armchair that Albus felt a pleasantly lightheaded just walking by them. He couldn't see that they were having much of an effect on his pupil's father, which was somewhat alarming. He hoped that the muggle had become habituated to them, and that what he was seeing wasn't a powerful effect they were in fact having on him.

The walls (the witch's writing, here) were charmed to amplify light and keep the room at a reasonably comfortable temperature, the bookcases to preserve their contents and keep dust away. The kitchen had been runically declared a woman's hallowed space (but not by a woman's hand), which explained why Snape had been so hurried about fetching the apple juice. Even the story-box was sitting on a stand that warded against theft, damage, and decay, and the wire going into the wall was etched with an arithmantic array Albus didn't quite understand. Something about smoothing the passage of lightning, as nearly as he could make out.

It was the most thoroughly magical house Albus had ever been in that didn't belong to a wealthy squib. Witches and wizards didn't need their houses to be as magical as this. Enough charms to keep the light and temperature as desired without fuss, the structure sound, and the house as much larger on the inside as necessary, and most witches and wizards could provide their own magic as the occasion required—including the illusion of muggle appliances, should they need or care to entertain the mundane.

Albus could feel Snape's eyes on him, and turned with a genial smile. "You have a charming ho," was as far as he got before breaking off to stare at the picture box.

A stout, pleasant-looking woman, her grey curls less effusive than those of the tall man in the frock coat, was stuffing an enormous, very long cream cake into her mouth while a man's voice talked proudly about the 'moment of splat.' She looked quite pleased as the cream went all over her face.

It would have been, Albus thought, thoroughly obscene if she had been younger. Was, as far as he was concerned, although the shorter-lived muggles might not think so.

Then a middle-aged man in some sort of uniform did precisely the same thing with a round cake, seeming to enjoy it just as much. It was enough to make the old wizard go rather pink in the face and think back with a note of longing to when Sarah Bernhardt's Hamlet and Judas had been considered scandalous, no matter how dreadful those times had really been for most people.

"Commercial," Snape explained curtly, shooting him a delightfully familiar are-you-stupid look.

"I see," Albus lied. He gestured at the paperbacks, and asked, "Are these yours, or your wife's?"

"Mine," Snape said, with an expression caught between proud and surly. "We can do a few things ourselves without tha fancy sticks, tha knows. And more all the time."

"No doubt, no doubt," agreed Albus, not enlightened. He could not, for a pound of dragon's blood, have stopped himself asking, "And the, er, saltshakers?"

The explanation was about as enthused as Horace's raptures over students like Lily Evans-as-was and young Gwenog Jones, but continued not to enlighten. It got very complicated, moving from fictional saltshakers to apparently real things like complicated adding machines, objects which cleaned by sucking up the floor (Albus had probably misheard that, but didn't care to interrupt with a question), something that sounded a bit like a handheld and fireless floo, a method for scanning cats, which Albus couldn't make out at all, and, horribly, artificial hearts. Nonetheless, he wasn't in the least displeased that it lasted until the door opened.

"Professor Dumbledore," the woman exclaimed, taken aback and so surprised she looked almost scandalized. She was clutching a package which Albus took, by it's shape, to be a pig's head. "What on _earth_ are you doing here?" The first surprise past, she was looking at him fearfully, obviously suspecting bad news about her son.

"Ah, Eileen," Albus said, jovially enough to put her worries at rest, removing his hat with a courteous half-bow. "You're looking well. And brawn for supper, I see! You're a lucky man, Mr. Snape. Eileen, your husband was just telling me about something thoroughly incomprehensible; it's been most enjoyable. I wonder, though, if I might have a few moments of your time?"

In truth, Eileen was not looking entirely well. To be sure, she had the air of a person who had fully grown into herself, and what had in her youth often been a sour, surly face had turned brisk and certain, if shuttered. She was worn, though, very worn, her black hair turned to solid steel, lines of grim care and determined misery scored into her face. She looked closer to sixty than forty, and her hands were as raw and calloused as Argus Filch's.

"Brawn?" her husband asked, evidently not sure whether to be very pleased or very suspicious. "That's dear."

"Stan Martin's happier with his liver these days," she returned. "We'll have it tomorrow." He grunted, turning back to the picture box. She surveyed Albus with wary disfavor, and sighed a little. "Suppose you can come talk while I cook, if you can stand the kitchen. Most men can't, I notice."

"I should be delighted," he said cordially, wondering how many of the runes she even knew about.

"Close door; I want t'hear me program, not tha jabberin'," Snape ordered.

Though the wards were crude, it was an impressive piece of work from a student as young as Severus must have been, both in finding such an old and primal spell and in the execution. Albus could feel the kitchen's unwelcoming hostility the moment he thought about going into it. He therefore pricked his thumb on his hat-pin and smeared the blood onto the lintel as he passed. Closing the door behind him, he felt the discomfort of being a grown man in a witches' hallow fade to a background chill as his sacrifice was accepted.

He started to tell her what a lovely kitchen-stillroom she had, which was very nearly true. If not truly lovely, it was at least very clean, with a wonderful pinkish shine on her copper pots. She cut him off at once, though, saying sharply, "Don't muck me about, Professor. You didn't come to admire the kettles. What's the matter with Severus?"

"Oh, he's quite well at the moment," he assured her. "However, if I may be blunt…"

"See if you can," she said, looking at him impatiently as she turned a knob on a large box. There was a quick smell of gas, and a ring of blue flame burst out from under a large pot sitting on the box's top.

"How ingenious!" he exclaimed, diverted.

"You were going to try to be blunt?" she reminded him scathingly.

"Ah, yes," he recollected, and sat at the little table while she started burning the pig's bristles away with a candle and cut the ears off the head. He could have had the head prepared for her and water created, boiling and cooled to a simmer in ten seconds flat without hurrying, but something in her face warned him against offering. "As I said, Eileen, he seems to be doing well at the moment, but—"

"What do you have to do with him now he's graduated?" she asked, the thought evidently just striking her. "He never gave me the impression you much cared for him."

Albus sighed inwardly. He really did not know where some of the children got the hurt idea that he was intimately involved in the lives of all the rest. "I don't get to know most of the children well while they're in school anymore, you know," he said. "As I no longer teach classes, I rarely see most of them unless they're in some sort of trouble. However, I have been seeing more of your son in recent days, and I must tell you that I have some concerns about his future sanity."

"Well, that ship's long since sailed," she said, with a sour irony that only a fool would mistake for anything but fierce love and pride.

Speaking as though she'd meant it, he said, "I think not. But I do believe him at risk, Eileen." Seeing her take a large knife out, he inquired, "Would you be so kind as to allow me to divide the head? It might be difficult to hear each other over the knife method."

She made a _tch!_ noise, but allowed him to pick up his wand and speed her preparations. The pieces went into a large pan, and then an ice box which would not, if Albus knew his runes (he did), need new ice more than twice a year, and that largely to prevent unpleasant odors. He sighed to himself, and again refrained from offering to save her a trip to the pump after he'd gone. "At risk for what, exactly?"

"Have you ever known him," he asked, watching her carefully, "to simply… stop?"

"Stop what?"

He explained.

She simply stopped herself, although not as completely as Severus had under the tree. After standing quite still for a long, long moment, she began to rub her arms, slow and hard. After a while, she nodded, just as slowly. It seemed to take a great deal of effort.

"Tell me how it began, please," he requested. It was not a request. "I'm afraid I must understand if I'm to help him, and I would like very much to help him."

She swallowed, not meeting his gaze, and held still for a while, apart from that slow scrubbing of her arms. Finally, she nodded again, and went into the sitting room to fetch the pitcher and Albus's glass. Pouring herself some juice, she sipped it, stared into it, put it down.

Still not meeting his eyes, she said, "It were hard, after the mill closed. Even the first time. Oh, they didn't all, but enough. The one most of the men our way worked for did, and a few others. Not enough work to go around. There's Toby, on the dole, and it hurt him. It hurt him," she said, raising her black eyes to meet his, defiant with past pain. "I don't know as a wizard like you would understand what it's like for these muggle men when they can't work to bring money home. It weren't just Toby, either—it was a poison on the whole town.

"But it was worse for my lad. Me and my wand, and I could feed us, and our Very so quick. Even when Toby was working, it wasn't the kind of work that would interest a clever lad like our Very. And he was good at the potions, he wanted to help me all the time. And Toby, Toby just had nothing to offer him, nothing to make him say _I want to be just like Da_. He took it hard," she said, looking down at the table. "Right hard."

Albus waited.

"It weren't just Toby," she repeated, nearly but not quite looking at him again. "Seemed like it happened overnight, all the men turning to drunks. There were other mills and factories, but only so many places in them for new hires.

"But me and the lad, we could do things Toby couldn't. Weren't just we needed him and he couldn't provide, like other women's husbands. We could have got on without him and he knew it. It was worse for him."

"He was angry," Albus suggested gently.

"He was _scared,_ " Eileen fired back at him, sharp as nettles again. "He was _sad_. Thought he was nothing, just an extra mouth. He's bright enough for a man, Toby is, more'n bright enough for a mill man. Could have gone farther in school than he did if there'd been more school his da could afford."

Glaring at him, daring him to disagree, she nearly snarled, "But my boy has a mind like diamonds, he has. Like _diamonds_ , man, I'm telling you. Cuts through anything and throwing light and dreams all over everywhere, never stops thinking, never, rips through books like he needs them to breathe, and remembers them, and corrects them, too! Sod manners, sod respect, sod decorum, sod the rules, tell me what's true, tell me what's right; that's my lad. I can't keep up with him most days, and there's few enough around here went as far as… went as far as OWLs, you'd say. And Toby's strong, or was then, he's fair enough with his hands, but he's no wizard. Thought he was nothing," she repeated.

She took a deep breath, and pushed out of a tight mouth, "And he'd go out and get drunk with his mates, all of them getting drunk together so they didn't feel so much like nothing, like wanting to die, and he'd come home feeling like a man again, and there's his boy studying Greek and Latin, and who in Toby's family, who in this purgatory ever did that? Never mind the arithmancy, the Latin was bad enough.

"The Greek was worse," she added morosely. "Muggles know a thing or two about the Greeks, and there's Severus too shy to stand his hair short enough he didn't look like an ugly girl. All over the moon about that pretty little Evans girl, he was, but never looking like he wants to kiss her. And muggles don't care for it when a boy looks up to a girl, when he's friends with her, real friends, like, doesn't want to pull her hair or kiss her. My stars, no, they do not care for that at all. Can't imagine it, if she's pretty, do not like it one bit. Ugly, they can get."

Albus knew that. He'd never felt particularly inclined to care, but only a handful of times in his long life had he ever felt as raw as young Severus on his steadiest day, and he knew that, too. And he'd never had to live with them, with muggles and their opinions.

"He comes home," she went on, "and there's our Very in clothes from the neighbors that don't match or fit him, on account of I don't get paid in money, mostly. That was the best we could do for him. If I'd used magic, even when I could have, they'd all have noticed, and we had to save for his school things, didn't we?"

Albus judged that this was not the time to tell her that there was a fund for students without their own resources. Perhaps she knew, and wouldn't have touched it for the world. Then again, he and Minerva had both been becoming accustomed to new responsibilities at around that time; it wouldn't have been surprising if something had been forgotten. Or if Minerva had been afraid of getting her eyes scratched out when she'd meant to bring it up, if Eileen had looked at her the way Eileen did, the way Severus did. Gryffindor courage and duty might not always hold out against Gryffindor respect for Gryffindor pride when two fierce Northern witches faced off, Scotland and York.

"Toby sees him with his bones like knives and mine, too, because we couldn't afford what Toby was drinking. And we couldn't give up the electricity," she said, looking at Dumbledore helplessly. "The telly was the only thing kept Toby quiet at home, sometimes."

"He felt guilty?" he asked.

"Felt like _nothing,_ didn't I say?" she snapped. "There's Very in the summers nattering about his precious Lily and her clever, useless, sunshine-and-rainbows magic and her posh summer house and her posh parents he thought were so _kind_ … S'pose they were _kind_ enough, though what they did to those girls of theirs was criminal, in my opinion, thoughtless, feckless fools that they were. There's Very lighting fires and putting them out with his hands, making ice with his eyes, there's his boy who's got no mates, just one fancy little girl three months out of twelve and an old load of books, and my man has nothing to offer him, and he's just not interested, and what could I do, stop helping the neighbors when their thanks were all that was feeding us? Tell Severus stop helping, when I needed the extra hands, when he was so good, he was _so good_ right from the start, I knew he'd be better than I ever was before I sent him off to you. He had the knack for it and the knowing and the _thirst_ , and we had nothing to send him out into the world with but skill, and Toby'd come home and see him turning fast as he could into nothing like a muggle, such a damned good wizard—" Her voice broke. She turned away, eyes hot and dark in a face like stone.

"He came home, and felt like nothing again, and then he got angry?"

She nodded, scrubbing her arms harder. "Hated himself, he did," she choked out. "My man. Hated us. We hated him. Hated each other. Hated ourselves. You know what it's like, Professor, loving someone so hard you can't breathe, when you hate them so hard you can't sleep?"

Albus knew. He knew very well what that was like. He wondered whether, if he'd been a witch himself, he would have had the courage or the urge to tell her so, to tell her about his curdled molten gold.

But she didn't want to know about Albus, even if she'd asked. She just wanted him to understand. And he never wanted to talk about Gellert, not to anyone. Certainly not to a little girl he'd taught to turn matches into needles and made cocoa for when she'd been homesick.

Gently, he said, "He hurt you. He hurt you both."

She swallowed, and turned her head jerkily to give Albus one of the bitterest smiles he'd ever seen, except on a mouth just like hers. "Nearly left him once or twice. Nearly killed him more often than that. It used to be just me, but Severus got older, he'd try to stop it…"

She laughed, dry. Albus thought it was a horrible sound. "Trouble was, he were a good boy, apart from that smart mouth of his. You'd think that'd be a blessing, wouldn't you? A boy who didn't want trouble, wasn't too afraid of being called names to duck it when he could. But I always thought if he'd given Toby more of a chance to tan his hide for him for mischief, let Toby feel more like a father… only, the things Toby hated, the hair and the magic and that, those weren't him being bad; Toby knew that.

"And the fights were about the only thing Severus did that made him proud in a way he could fit into his world, wrap his head around; the only things that made him feel he was raising his boy into a man. So when Severus got hurt, it wasn't generally on account of deserving it. Right confusing that is; I should know. Makes it hard to know what's what, hard to know what's right."

"You must have been very brave, to stay."

"Severus says I was an idiot," she told him. This smile, although wry, had more heart in it.

"A House hazard, I fear," he smiled back.

"Yes," she said, looking down again as the light died in her eyes. "Thing is, there wasn't anywhere to go, particularly, and it would have killed Toby, just killed him. And there's few around here as can afford a real muggle doctor, let alone find a licensed mediwitch. And with the air and the water the way it is, and all the work to be had breaks backs and hands and eardrums, everyone's lungs filling up with dust and cotton fluff and… and whatever it is that candy factory does to them. No heating or cooling charms and the bloody idiots think opening windows hurts the product… They needed me, and where else could I start up working where people would trust me enough to come calling right away? Only back in York, where they can afford healers, where Da wouldn't have a muggle's wife back if I came on me knees."

She shook her head. "I couldn't do it; I just couldn't. And you don't have to tell me, Professor, that wanting to never get stuck like me's what made our Very want Slytherin. He's told me himself, in one of those brutal moods of his. You don't have to tell me I'm why he's in the mess he's in, stuck with friends like those. Worst Toby could ever do was break a few bones; I don't need a wand or fancy Diagon ingredients to fix what _he_ can do."

"Well, I haven't come about that, exactly," he said. "Although I do think Severus is in for trouble having to do with his friends."

"That ship's _surely_ sailed," she sighed, rubbing her hand over her mouth and taking a long draught of her juice.

"I hear nothing but good of his closest friends: young Rosier and the new Mrs. Malfoy," Albus offered. This was true, although the same could not be said for Rosier's father or Mrs. Malfoy's, or her oldest sister. Although in pureblooded families, politics got passed down like coloring, almost inescapably. "Or the youngest Mr. Black. We entrusted them all with prefectures, and they did very well, you know."

" _Rosier._ Smug, self-satisfied, lazy-arse, dandified twit," Eileen muttered.

Albus laughed, and asked playfully, "I don't suppose, Eileen, you could name the saint or monarch with whom you _would_ trust your boy?"

Looking exactly like said boy, she humored Albus by giving this some hard thought, and eventually admitted, on the breath of a chuckle, "Maybe not." Albus twinkled at her, and she smiled back for a moment before adding grimly, "I _don't_ like him, though. He may have his claws pulled back in those velvet paws, but they're there right enough. He's not honest, and he's dangerous."

"As someone who had to sort out his fights for seven years," Albus told her, "I can assure you that Severus is dangerous, as well."

"But he _feels_ things," she said, turning grim eyes to him. "That slick bastard could just rip the heart right out of him. He's like Toby that way; he feels things too hard."

"Is that why he puts a stop to himself?" Albus asked.

She shrugged wearily. "I expect it was the only thing he thought he could do, once he got strong enough to kill his Da without half trying, and still too young to do magic he could control without the Ministry landing on us next minute. Go away, tell himself it wasn't happening, or if it was he wasn't there to feel it. I used to do it myself, after Toby broke me wand, until I realized Very'd step in while I was out."

"It's dangerous for wizardkind," he told her quietly. It was shocking to hear someone say _broke my wand_ so casually, but he supposed she'd had years to get over it. "It's something the brain does, and that's all right for muggles, when things are so terrible that they need it. But a wizard's magic combined with a wizard's despair… a wizard can stay gone until his body dies. A wizard can stop his own heart."

She shivered, fingers tightening on her arms again, then looked at him squarely. "What do you want from me, Dumbledore?" she demanded. "What is it you think I can do?"

"I think that first I had better ask if there's anything you I might do for you," he said. He couldn't see any bruises now, but wanded or not, she was still a witch. What he couldn't see meant nothing.

She gave a grim little smile. "Never come back here. It always upsets Toby, having magic rubbed in his face. It'll help that you let him talk about those stories of his where muggles can do ridiculous things with science, and he doesn't lose control now Very's out of the house. But if you want to talk again, send me a time and we'll meet out in the woods, or something like."

"An owl won't upset him?"

She shrugged. "Not much at night. He might even be interested if you made it look like a carrier pigeon, mind."

Albus nodded. "I think that could be arranged."

"Well, then?"

He looked at her sympathetically, wishing he had some quest to set her, some useful job she could do for her child. "I'm sorry, Eileen; you've already done it. I came because I had to understand how and why he does these things. He's come to me for instruction in mind magic, you see. It's vital that I know where the traps his mind might be making for him could lie, what's happened to him that might be making more than I know about."

"That's dark stuff, mind magic," she said sharply.

"It is certainly dangerous," Albus agreed. "Particularly for someone who feels deeply. Young Rosier sent him to find a teacher out of a fear he was doing it already, Eileen, without knowing it, only out of instinct."

He caught the flicker of a look she was trying not to give him, and smiled. "Yes, he was afraid for him." He let the _not so slick, perhaps?_ hang a bit, until she looked sour and disgruntled, and then went on, "And I'm afraid he was right. Learning this might be very good for Severus, or it might only help him stay as he is now. But he's liable to destroy himself if he goes on doing it without intention and mastery."

Her shoulders slumped. Getting up to turn off the flame under the copper pot, she sighed, evidently to herself, "I half wish it _had_ been drugs with him. We thought it was for a while," she told Albus, looking at him with a hard, rueful twist to her mouth. "Toby was almost relieved. He could understand drugs, and he took it personal, the way Severus walks out when he smells beer. As well he should have. But he could have understood drugs. That's what everyone else's boys were doing, when they could get them. That's all Toby's ever wanted; to just have the same problems other men have."

"Take heart," Albus said, patting her roughened hand as she came back to the table. "It's himself; he can learn to control himself."

"Professor," she said dryly, "he's a brewer, and a Prince, and his da's lad. He'd have a better chance of controlling the drugs."

* * *

**Full disclosure:** I've seen like three episodes of Dr. Who total. None of them were less recent than Barty Jr. :D

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next post** : _"And you're quite sure your Slytherins only know the sensible parts of the story, are you?" Filius asked in a let's-be-reasonable voice._  
>  "There were some?" Minerva wondered aloud, dust-dry, as Severus's face fell.
> 
> It's 1985, and Hogwarts's most junior (permanent) faculty member may have slightly underestimated his influence on his admiring students. …No, seriously. It's, like, a problem.
> 
>  **Next chapter** : Lily gets whumped upside the head with a two-by-four, which is probably not the best thing for a gal in her third trimester. Fortunately, she has an old friend with her for company. Maybe fortunately. It's kind of the source of every scruple, iota, and ton of her immediate stress, let's be honest.
> 
> I'm posting a short before the next chapter because frankly I thought that after this one a bit of a break from the angst would be a good idea. Yes, I know there were freaky psuedopornographic '80s commercials and such at the beginning (that specific ad is on youtube, you can find it, I have watched it, my eyes went o.O) but I'm pretty sure the child abuse and intimate partner violence ate them. Domestic abuse kinda does that to humor, IMO. Things sort of aren't funny after that happens. So we'll have some totally unrelated funny (only... yeah... well... ) before the plot hits.
> 
> The frivolous faculty series really (as I think I said last time) needs a name as it expands into enough shorts to make a series... because I really don't want to call it the frivolous faculty series. For one thing, it's really only frivolous comparatively, it's not even all that lighthearted all the time... just because Severus goes WAAAUUUGH and flails dramatically less and has it together more and smirks a lot...
> 
> There is going to be a lot of WAAUUUGH and flailery next chapter, btw. Just FYI. ;)
> 
> So, so much. XDDD
> 
>  **Location, location, location** : good arguments have been made by Whitehound for Manchester and Pottermore has invented a place called Cokeworth (Need I repeat my stance on Pottermore? Not. Canon). I agree with many of Whitehound's points and point you at them, but I read Severus as coming from somewhere more isolated, without access to an urban scene. This isn't going to be relevant, at least in this chapter, but Whitehound also has some good info about the probable layout of Spinners End as a house(ish) and I do hold with her there. Nelson isn't the most slick town in the UK even today, and the Tesco's seems to have closed in 2010, which I understand to be like the Stop & Shop closing or something, but it's still doing MUCH better than it was in the '70s.
> 
> I'm not sure whether they're still making Jelly Babies there, but they were certainly doing that long after the textile and coal mining industries declined and anyway, The Beatles' George Harrison was reported to have liked them (until they got thrown at the stage in unsafe adoration too often) and so did the Second and Fourth Doctor, so there's that.


	44. Maternity Ward, St. Mungo's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lily gets whumped upside the head with a two-by-four, which is probably not the best thing for a gal in her third trimester. Fortunately, she has an old friend with her for company. Maybe fortunately. It's kind of the source of every scruple, iota, and ton of her immediate stress, let's be honest.
> 
> Severus likes Divination less and less every time they meet. He sort of wishes he could say the same about Lily; it would make his life so much less painful...  
> (also, the books much shorter.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : fpreg, Gryff-POV, and PLOT!

“You’re doing wonderfully,” Warrington said enthusiastically, putting her wand away.

“Ha!” Lily disagreed.

“I didn’t say you were _feeling_ wonderfully,” the mediwitch smiled.

“Oh, well, all right, then,” Lily said, managing to smile back, albeit grudgingly.

“Cranky?” Warrington asked shrewdly.

“Beyond belief.”

“Perfectly normal,” the healer assured her. “I can send you home with a potion, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

“I just want to be _donnnnnnne_ ,” Lily moaned.

“Want to find out when?” Warrington smiled.

“You can do that?” she asked, interested.

“In the ninth month we have a really strong accuracy rate, except when—” a bell chimed, and Warrington got up with a frown. “Except when someone gets a shock or something. Excuse me, won’t be a mo.” She stuck her head out the door and called, “What?”

The healer’s secretary at the desk called back, “Your bee-oh’s back, Nell!”

“I am _not,_ ” said a deep, cross voice that made Lily stand up at once, if clumsily, with her heart pounding. She was about to sit down again, telling herself she was being ridiculous, but then it went on to be unmistakable. “And even if I were, that is _not_ how it’s pronounced _,_ Nettley. Never, ever go to France, they’ll run you out on a log.”[1]

Lily stepped next to Warrington, and asked, “Sev? What are you doing here?”

Instant silence.

After a moment, Sev rose from one of the collection of broad armchairs that Nettley’s desk hid from sight. They looked at each other for a long moment.

“Uh-oh,” Nettley sing-songed.

“Don’t be inane,” Sev snapped at her, without taking his eyes off Lily.

“You look well,” she said, a little tremulously.

The last time they’d passed each other, she’d gotten a noseful of the fume-repellant they’d brewed together so often with his mum, which looked so awful on him and smelled so good. She’d told herself, fiercely, that scent-memory was the strongest and she simply wasn’t allowed to live in a past she’d put away for very good reasons.

It hadn’t helped. She’d been overcome with a wave of missing the friend whose choices she couldn’t live with. But when their eyes had met, he’d started to look wary and hopeful in a way that had nearly made her soften until she’d steeled herself. He’d jolted and drawn back instantly, and his throat had clenched. He’d given her such a furious, poisonous, contemptuous look that she’d barely held together until she’d gotten home, and then cried for an hour.

Granted, she probably hadn’t been lying when she’d told Jamie it was from mood swings.

It had stayed with her, though. It had been so long since she’d talked to him, she’d forgotten how badly, how easily she could hurt him. She’d almost made herself forget how much she’d liked him once, the way they’d relied on each other, how naturally they’d turned to each other, the ease and sparking pleasure of working together (this was harder. Sirius was a much more troublesome partner, although also brilliant in his more mercurial way), the way he’d fought so hard to get her back that only burying herself in her other friends and their very firm opinions had let her keep her resolve.

He did look good. Looked more like his mother, now, than the hunched scarecrow she’d used to spend her summers with, learning about what her world was going to be. Lily had always thought that Ellie Snape was the strongest person she’d ever met, right up next to McGonagall. That was better than beautiful, as long as one didn’t have to snog it.

She saw a softening in his cold eyes. Before she could decide whether to steel herself against it again, he gave her the sort of thin, curly, _why, yes, I am a bastard, good of you to notice_ smile she remembered so well and said with cheerful malice, only brittle if you knew how to hear him, “You look like the Hindenburg. On fire and everything.”

The two St. Mungo’s witches exploded on him in a shower of scolding, but Lily threw back her head (to let her ‘flames’ catch the light) and laughed. “Severus Snape, you are just _awful_ ,” she told him, grinning.

That softened him more, even dropped his shoulders a notch. He stepped towards her and held out a hand, which she just could not stop herself taking. That was probably mood swings, too, but somehow she couldn’t regret it. They didn’t shake, but just stood there for a moment, until he squeezed and let her go.

“What _are_ you doing here?” she asked, re-settling her weight, much wanted in most ways but in practice admittedly and increasingly inconvenient.

“That toffee-nosed friend of yours having trouble again?” Warrington asked wearily.

“ _Yes,_ ” Sev told her, just as wearily.

“She could come in herself, you know.”

“You tell her,” he said flatly. “I keep telling her and _telling_ her this isn’t my field. Help.”

Warrington shook her head in exasperated sympathy. “I’m with a patient right now, but—”

“Sev can come in with me,” Lily heard her voice say. They all looked at her in surprise, no one more startled than he was. She blushed. “Well, it’s not anything _personal_ at this point, is it, Madam Warrington? And I guess I’m getting a little nervous.”   At least, that was the only explanation she could think of. Or was going to admit to.

Warrington looked between them and shrugged. “I don’t think he should make you less nervous,” she told Lily, turning back into the room. “He had me kidnapped last month.”

Lily whipped around, hoping she wasn’t making the poor baby motion sick in there. Fortunately, by the time she was facing Sev she’d realized that the healer sounded sardonic, not upset, and so her face was only confused.

“In my defense,” Sev said grouchily, and Lily felt her lips twitch, “a rabid Howler on infinite loop was savaging me with a portkey at the time.” He explained, catching her bemusement, “Narcissa has developed this odd, unshakeable notion that I am her personal substitute for the entirety of St. Mungo’s. Not sharing in this madness, when she went into labor and panicked at me I asked a colleague to go fetch one of the midwives while I fended off the attack envelope which wouldn’t let me leave the room. Lovegood—did you know her when she was Chang? Year behind us, Ravenclaw? Not precisely peremptory, but _other people understanding_ has never been her top priority.”

“You’re still friends with Narcissa?” she asked, trying to be neutral. While it was true that she personally had never caught Narcissa Black in anything deeply terrible, Sirius (who she was more inclined to take seriously than she had been at school, although that wasn’t saying much) had told her that not being caught meant _nothing_ when it came to his fairest coz.

He slid her a gelid, sarcastic look, and purred, “You’re still pals with _James_?”

“All right, all right, we won’t talk about them,” she said hastily. “Come keep me company.”

“Is this really all right?” he asked Warrington, frowning.

The healer shrugged, closing the door behind them all. “If the patient says it’s all right, it’s all right. The baby’s not having an emergency, is he?”

“She thinks so,” Sev said, with his familiar, reassuringly callous _overreaction detected_ eye-roll. “There’s definitely something wrong, but it isn’t a fast-moving problem. Well,” he amended, “there _is_ an acute problem, but I think it’s a separate issue. And it looks like textbook colic. Literally textbook. Because that’s how I know about it. From a book. I repeat: help. When you’re done.”

Warrington gave a long-suffering nod, and sat down. With a little wand-work, she produced a divination table and a battered back of cards out of a drawer.

“Really?” Sev asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Didn’t you just say this wasn’t your field?” Lily asked him sweetly.

“ _That_ certainly isn’t.”

“Hush up, sourpuss,” she ordered, and got to see his skeptical I-want-to-poke-it-in-case-it-explodes face crack into a smile for a second before he got control of it again.

After a moment, while Warrington was doing some sort of enchantment involving crystals on her deck, Sev kicked her lightly in the ankle and whispered, “Cow.”

“Pig,” she retorted, kicking back.

“Git.”

“Berk.”

“Bint.”

“Prat.”

“Chair.”

“—What?”

“I was naming monosyllabic objects,” Sev gave her an innocent blink. “Weren’t we naming monosyllabic objects? I thought that was what we were doing. I win, by the way. ‘What’ isn’t a noun. Interrogative. Interjection. Pronoun at best.”

Lily laughed, and reached for his hand again. “I’ve missed you,” she told him, her smile going a little wobbly. She knew it shouldn’t have surprised her that his fingers weren’t any harder or rougher than they had been; he’d always been very careful not to risk his sensitivity. He was so picky about ingredients, about temperatures and preparation. But somehow she’d let herself imagine he’d gone all hoary and calloused, like that hairy-hearted warlock in the kids’ story. It was ridiculous, the way it made her want to cry to realize he was probably, when she thought about it, really thought about _him,_ still as smooth as a swimmer in case a floor-cauldron set his trousers on fire, the paranoid little ferret.

Bet his boyfriend liked that. Assuming he still had the same one. But he would still have the same one, wouldn’t he? This was Sev. He wouldn’t let go till you’d hexed all his teeth out and he had nothing to hold with.

And now she really was going to cry. No, she _wouldn’t._ She’d _had to_. He hadn’t left her a choice. You couldn’t keep on pretending that someone who you had nothing in common with and who’d spit in your face in public was a friend even if you were sort of family and you wished them (once you’d washed your face and calmed down) well. She wasn’t friends with Tuney, either, no matter how much she loved her, no matter how much she wished things could have been different. There was a point where you just had to say, all right, you’ve made your choice then, and salvage what dignity you could, and live your life.

He eyed her, dour and judicious, and finally sighed, “Well, I lived through Narcissa’s mood swings. And she knows more curses than you.”

“I did,” she insisted. “Just because I couldn’t—it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have rather…”

“Sooner or later, Neither-do-they-toil,” he said, almost gently over the hard, hard core of it, “you’re going to have to realize you can’t make someone else be who you think they ought to be. And you certainly can’t do it without taking the third party’s knife off their throat. Try to learn that before the sprog gets too old, will you, Evans? Shouldn’t like to see you turn into Da.”

“I thought your name was Potter,” Warrington said, interrupting Lily’s sudden lurch into confused teariness.

“We’re old, old friends,” she told the healer.

“Whereas her husband and I would probably each run for salted lemons if one came upon the other splinched legless,” Sev said brightly. “Not that I’ve imagined that scenario in any way before now.” Lily gave a watery giggle, which got rapidly more watery than giggly. He silently passed her a laurel-green handkerchief with his free hand, and asked Warrington, “Ready soon?”

“Anytime you are,” she said to Lily, who blew her nose and nodded. The cloth, she wasn’t surprised to find, was self-cleaning. She’d never met anyone more entranced with the possibilities of magic than Sev.

He’d hooked his knee-high boot around her ankle under the table (funny, she’d thought the leather looked stiff, but no), bracing and solid. Even if she’d been going to tell Jamie about any of this, she wouldn’t tell him about that. Jamie liked to play footsie; thought it very sly and sexy and fun, which it was. Quidditch players got good with their feet in ways that non-flyers didn’t expect; there was a lot of small-muscle movement involved in controlling a broom, and the more fancy flying one did, the more of the larger movements turned out to get balanced out by the toes, whether a flyer did it on purpose or not.

This wasn’t at all like that. She thought Sev probably wouldn’t even sneak around under a table with his own bloke, or at least not with anyone else around. Being secretly there for someone was about as daring as her old friend got, but Jamie would never understand that, not in a million years. He wouldn’t understand how anyone could think being there for someone needed secrecy, and when Sev was involved he’d just assume ickiness that would never cross Sev’s mind in _two_ million years.

In fact it felt so good it almost made her want to keep crying for a completely different reason. Parents and girlfriends were lovely but they alternately pried and were baffled, and Tuney wasn’t lovely at all anymore, hadn’t been for years. And Jamie and Siri were so… so _bouncy_ when they wanted to cheer her up. Jamie could be tender in private, but he’d never just sit there being there. Remus would, but she was never quite sure whether he really understood or just knew what he was supposed to do and was doing it. And she knew she made Pete nervous; it was if he was always afraid she might shout at him, or disapprove, or worse: he might get JAMES’S GIRL smudged or something and then James would be annoyed.

Sev always understood, even when he didn't agree. And he didn’t _care_ if he didn’t agree, as long as she wasn’t trying to make him do anything he thought was off the table for him. If she wasn’t trying to make him do something he was sure was a bad idea, it didn’t matter how completely wrong they each thought the other was.  Until she felt better and was fit for the argument, he’d still pass her a handkerchief and sit close and tell her what had happened when he stewed sloe berries in a copper cauldron in goat’s milk under a crescent moon, or ask about her new Charms project out of genuine interest, or stare at the mediwitch’s tarot cards in morbid fascination with his foot wrapped around her ankle in silent comfort and ask what the hell she thought _that_ was all about.

Lily had taken Creature Care instead of Divination at school. Sev had taken both, but had only lasted a couple of weeks before he’d run to Slughorn, screaming his head off about inconsistencies between systems and misty, useless fluff. He’d reeled and clutched in dismal horror at everyone until he was finally allowed to drop it and take Arithmancy instead. No one had gotten an unrelated word out of him for the two further weeks he’d used to catch up, but afterwards he’d been much happier. Albeit less entertaining.

Therefore, neither of them understood what Warrington and her cards were doing, or why she kept asking Lily to touch a card, shuffle the deck, breathe on things. He couldn't have thought she would either; he was obviously just being distracting. Appreciating it and quite willing to go along, Lily suggested, “Kabala?”

“Looks like,” he said cautiously, and asked the mediwitch, “Kabala?”

“Concentrating,” she replied briefly, and they shrugged at each other.

Sev let go Lily’s foot and kicked her companionably under the table again, because he was hopeless. He actually _apologized_ , though, when she told him her ankles were actually a bit swollen so would he stop that please.

She nearly died of shock, with gestures, and he thumbed his giant nose at her. She bit her thumb at him, and he sneered, “I absolutely refuse the starcrossed Verona abomination,” so they started quoting Ruddigore at each other.

Ruddigore, because Sev had a voice that Lily did not feel should be wasted on Shakespeare. He declared that statement an oxymoronic tragicomedy but further declared he would patronizingly humor her progesterone-addled insanity.

She was unmoved. Most of Shakespeare’s villains were sneaks, connivers, or whiners, unworthy of a good, solid baritone, and Sev never had been able to get through a heroic monologue without snickering or throwing the book across the room in disgust. There was more of a role in light opera for sly resplendence.

Sev bowed to this point—literally, and gave himself illusory lace cuffs to embellish the florid gesticulations. They didn’t suit him, but actually went pretty well with his funny old-fashioned cravat and frock coat (which were ridiculous in theory, but suited him and were a huge improvement on what his parents had dressed him in). She didn’t actually squeal out loud to startle the mediwitch, or scare him away with a pregnant-bear hug, but her face hurt from grinning and she missed him _so much_.

They were still at it (after all, they hadn’t played this game together in years. She hadn’t with anyone, all her friends these days being cops and jocks or tired with a sore throat from dust stock-room and lunar screaming all the time, and who in Slytherin would he have shared Muggle plays with?) when Warrington cleared her throat.

“Not quite a month to go!” she told Lily cheerfully once she had their attention.

“That long?” she asked pathetically.

Then she noticed that Sev had gone still beside her, his hand gone tight around hers. The strength of grip he was capable of wasn’t a shock, not in a brewer who’d never gotten into the habit of using chopping, stirring, or peeling spells as a kid, but that he was using so much of that strength all of a sudden was worrying. His face merely casually interested and his voice perfectly normal, he asked, “Beginning of August, then?”

“No, it should be right around the 31st,” Warrington said cheerfully. “Quite likely the very day. I’d have an overnight bag packed as early as the 28th just in case, luv, but the cards are very clear; definitely July, definitely right at the end.” She leapt backwards, her chair clattering to the floor.

Lily would have, too, if she hadn’t been pinned by the uterus. In the space of a breath, the air around Sev had gone so cold that the cards were trapped under a thick layer of ice. Just like third year Halloween, when Jamie and his friends had been so completely out of line it hadn’t even been unfair of Sev to have set the whole table on fire (not that anyone had ever proved it, but, well, Sev). His hand was painfully hard on hers, now, blazing hot in the sudden chill, his face dead white.

“Sev?” she asked tentatively.

He turned to look at her, slowly, slowly. He wasn’t actually shaking, but there was that air about him. She opened her mouth to ask what the matter was. Before she could say a word, he’d slashed his wand at Warrington and hissed, “ _Nescio!_ _Obliviate! Tabula adamantium!”_

The witch’s eyes went blank; she seemed to be in a pleasant reverie.

“What did you—”

“She’ll be fine,” Sev said hoarsely.

“But—”

“Shut up, shut _up,_ I need to think.”

“Sev, you’re scaring me,” she said levelly.

 _“Good,_ ” he snarled, now shaking for real, and she shut up. “Right,” he said, not to her, beginning to breathe hard. “We can fix this. We can fix this. No, we sodding well can’t. Do it anyway. Right. Hell.” He scraped a palm over his mouth, so hard she could almost hear stubble although obviously there wouldn't be any because he was finicky like that and also she'd have seen it, with his hair as dark as it was.

“Right," he breathed, forceful and slow, in the kind of contained refusal to panic she'd only ever seen be about his mum before.  "No. All right. What would Ev do. Not get in this kind of fix in the first fucking place. Narcissa? Same times ten. Ah! Merlin had trouble this stupid!” he told her with a truly terrifying manic rictus, as though this thought was somehow comforting and she should be comforted. “Look at that Gorlois-Uther-Igraine mess! And the Vortigern and the blood-sacrifice business! Right! _There’s_ a digging-yourself-out model! Right!”

She watched him carefully, as one watches widening fissures one might have to jump. His breathing slowed after one long, deep breath. The ice began to melt, the chill to fade, and his eyes focused, but she wasn’t reassured.

“All right,” he said again, in a clear, brittle voice. “This is what we’re going to do. We’ll put the room in order, as though she’d just taken the cards out. Then I’ll cast a short-term time-perception distorting spell on her and wake her up. You tell her stop, you don’t want to be told the exact date after all. You’ll make yourself too nervous in the last days waiting for it, maybe, or you just can’t take divination seriously, or whatever you can sell—that is, whatever you like,” he corrected himself with a very sour, ironic look. Unlike the rictus, that was actually comforting. A bit. A very, very _tiny_ little bit. “Then I’ll consult with her on Narcissa’s problem. When we leave, she’ll think we’ve been talking about Draco for the whole time.”

“Draco? She called her baby _Draco_? Oh, the poor thing; that’s worse than Tuney’s—”

“No it isn’t,” he said, clipped but absent, in what sounded like a knee-jerk response to the idea of anything being done worse than Petunia would do it. She didn’t think he was really processing anything happening outside his own buzzing head. “That’ll get us out without comment. And by then I’ll have the next step,” he finished, clearly trying to convince himself he would.

“But why do we need—”

“I’m not talking about it here,” he cut her off. “Neither are you. You’re not talking about it with _anyone_. If I drop dead _this second_ you tell _no one_ about this but Dumbledore, do you understand? Not your husband and his big mouth, not _anyone_.”

She stared. That was the last person she’d have expected him to aim her at for anything, after the Tartan. “But, Sev—”

He rounded on her with blazing, terrified, furious eyes, his hand still so tight on hers she could feel her bones grind together. “That is what we are doing,” he gritted at her, like scraping millstones. “Do you understand? Are we clear? That is what we’re doing. Yes?”

“You’re explaining when we’re out,” she said, meeting his gaze firmly.

“Me or him. You talk to _no one else_ ,” he insisted.

“All right,” she said, almost as exasperated as she was afraid. “All right, yes, fine.”

He nodded, and kept nodding far too long, chin rising slowly, caught in the motion with fear until he was looking up and the gesture had slowly morphed to an unhappy head-shake. “You,” he told the sky showing in the enchanted ceiling, sounding tired, “have a rotten sense of humor.”

* * *

[1] Well spotted! You have excellent taste in fantasy Shakespearean academic sports parodies!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Evan's flat is NOT ALLOWED TO SMELL LIKE LILY. THIS IS NOT OKAY WITH HIM.


	45. #18 Dye Urn, Just After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Evan's flat is NOT ALLOWED TO SMELL LIKE LILY POTTER. THIS IS NOT OKAY WITH HIM.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A comment on the last chapter asked for the quotation game Lily and Severus were playing while the mediwitch did the cards for Lily. [I happily complied!](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/11285083) The result is, as I know some of you appreciate, layery. ^.^

“Is this your flat?” asked a surprised female voice, and Evan’s head whipped up. He dropped his palette on his foot. It went spinning onto the floor, leaving whorls of paint everywhere. He didn’t care. “It’s lovely!”

“Spike?” He headed out into the sitting room with his wand out. “What’s _she_ doing here? You’re in polyjuice? This is payback for that Mata Hari joke?” he demanded, not particularly hopeful.

Then he had to stop, because he suddenly had an overwrought Severus wrapped tightly all around him, clinging for dear life. He squeezed back on sheer startled reflex. Okay, also because it felt good. Besides, he probably wouldn’t turn down a Spike hug in front of Grandpère, Mum and the Dark Lord, in a formal audience with the Queen: in case Spike was in a fragile, insecure mood and took it the wrong way and Evan never got another one. He didn’t include Aunt Walburga on that list, because Severus would never, in any mood, be that crazy.

He glared at the Evans bitch. Or the Potter bitch now, he supposed. “What did you do to him?” he demanded pleasantly.

“Oh, please,” Spike scoffed shakily into his throat as the witch looked affronted.

Evan relaxed a little. He put as much humor as he could into his voice as he rubbed Spike’s back, asking, “Are you a cobra or a boa?”

“Want me to bite you?” Spike asked, without removing his face.

“Want you on your feet and spitting at the world,” Ev said into his temple, soft and decided, pressing a kiss in and threading a hand into the fine, dark hair. He glared at the witch again, largely because he could.

“Cobras don’t have feet,” she said.

If Evan had felt like being fair, he would have allowed that she looked more like the world had dumped too much confusion on her head today than as if she really thought herpetological anatomy was relevant. Since he did not, in fact, feel like being fair (Evans being in the room and all), he said, in a disgusted tone, “Salazar save us all.”

“Yes, please,” Severus sighed longingly into his clavicle.

“You know her caveman’s probably going to come barging in here at any moment,” he pointed out.

“Fine,” Spike said lightly, rallying. “He can stand petrified in the hall. Weren’t you saying the other day you wanted to replace the cloak-rack?”

“Potter would not be a step up, aesthetically speaking,” Evan drawled. Severus drew back, smiling, and kissed him softly, slipping gratitude for taking him in stride into Evan’s mouth, pressing it into his eyes.

“Would someone please tell me what’s going on?” the witch asked plaintively, shifting her weight.

“Do sit down; I’ll make you some tea,” Evan said genially.

“ _Oh,_ no,” Spike said, thumping his arm. “I didn’t bring her here to be poisoned.”

“I haven’t _poisoned_ anyone yet,” he protested, widening his eyes woundedly.

“One or two’ve nearly choked to death, when they weren’t prepared,” Spike said, shooting him an arch, dry look.

“Still, not poison!”

“You can help me,” Spike said. “Stay here, Evans.”

“Sev—”

“We need a minute,” Severus told her firmly. “Stay here.” She scowled, but turned to the bookshelves. Evan would have grinned a little at the Gryff’s failure or refusal to understand the most basic of polite fictions, if he hadn’t been so worried.

“Very good,” Evan said, when they were in the kitchen and safely ensconced behind a muffling spell. “I don’t feel jealous in the least.”

Spike stared at him. Eventually, Evan realized he wasn’t faking incomprehension, and rolled his eyes, shaking his head with tolerant fondness. Then Severus caught on, and glanced back towards the sitting room. With a quirky piece of a smile, he told Evan, “How novel. You’ll have to show me later.” Evan sparked back at him.

When he ducked away with slightly bruised lips and a stifling-a-smile look, it was to put the teakettle on the stove. “Really?” Evan asked, startled. Severus didn’t usually bother with the enchanted flames when it was for something as simple as heating water for tea. He didn’t need his wand or an appliance for temperature any more than Evan needed them for lighting charms.

“We’ll need more than a minute,” he explained. “Also…” he stepped in and kissed Evan again, lingering.

“I believe you, I believe you,” Evan laughed when they parted. “We can get down to business, Spike, I promise.”

“No, no, I’m raveningly curious to find what jealousy is like from the other end,” Severus said, his mouth pulling up. “This is probably my only chance; I’d hate to sabotage it. It’s not that. I had a bit of a shock and wanted you to talk to, and here you are, right away. It’s most convenient. Should be encouraged.”

“Well, I don’t have to be at—” he paused. “Spike, you’re supposed to be at work.”

“I know,” he said, abruptly looking miserable under his calm expression. “I just left on my break to look into something for Narcissa, and then _this_ happened.”

“You can’t keep letting yourself be called away,” Evan said, and paused. “Well, you _can,_ there’s no actual problem with it, but honestly? You’re going to be miserable and impossible to live with if you’re not working. I know you, Naj.”

“The demands are too unpredictable,” Severus said grimly. “We need a backup plan or three. I don’t have enough of a name to make an owl-order business work yet.”

“Narcissa and I can make that happen,” Evan promised. “With your potions? All you need is exposure and people to vouch for you, to get you in the door.”

“They know me in the Sherwood,” Severus said thoughtfully. “That could be a start. Even a place to set up. You’d like it there, it’s quaint and friendly and touristy on top, but underneath it they’re seven out of ten of them bloody-minded Ministry-conspiracy immovable objects. It’s traditional. And the other three think, in an attempt to be generous, that what we’ve got is, rather than conspiracy, headless-chicken incompetence.”

“So you feel right at home,” Evan summarized dryly, and dipped down to drink the resulting bright, unrepentant grin. By way of positive reinforcement, of course, not because it was stupidly, evilly magnetic.

“We might be able to get Additional Support, too,” he mused, pulling away rather sooner than he wanted to because they did, after all, have a guest, no matter how he felt about her. “An Understanding Sponsor, even, if you needed one for initial funding. Mr. Malfoy’s been happy with your work before, and Narcissa wouldn’t let Lucius let him take advantage of you.”

“Let Lucius? Narcissa doesn’t need intermediaries. You should have _seen_ her negotiate my salary in ’76,” Spike noted, not really distracted from his problems but, as always, ready to be entranced by Narcissa being terrifying at other people. “I suspect I’d only have to mention her. But…”

Evan knew what that trailing off was about. Spike had started off with nothing, and his margin of independence had had no leeway for so long that he’d never gotten a solid feel for give and take, for the distinctions between debts, favors, gifts, business dealings (fair or foul), and what friends did for each other. He pointed out, therefore, “It’d be convenient for more people than you if you had your days freed up.”

“…Not a bad argument for not doing it,” Severus decided grimly, not deflating, exactly, but re-compressing back into the Severus who stared problems down and tried to brain them with his brain instead of flowing around them.

Evan stared at him in incomprehension.

He said, “Think about Regulus.”

It took Evan a moment, but then he did think about Regulus: about how harried and worn down and sickened working with Bellatrix had been making his youngest cousin. He thought about what someone who thought like Bellatrix could do with a brewer as skilled as Spike at their beck and call, twenty-four hours a day. Somberly, he agreed, “Point.”

“Quite. But for now…”

“What do you need now, _right_ now?” Evan asked. “Under what circumstances could you go back to work and not pile on your risk of getting fired?”

Severus hesitated. “This can’t wait long,” he said slowly, “but… can you keep her here, keep her safe until I come back? I can probably manage useful-but-unpleasant enough to get sent home early without worsening my position, as long as I don’t make a habit of it.”

“Safe from what?”

Spike hesitated, then his shoulders relaxed. “Probably nothing, yet,” he admitted. “But we won’t get her back if she leaves, and we can’t lose control of this situation. Let her tell you what happened, tell her what you think it’s safe for her to know. Can you deal with Potter if he comes?”

“I can deal with him,” he scoffed with an airy hand. Nothing would give him greater pleasure than to blow up the wanker’s wand again, except possibly hanging him from the ceiling to stew like a web-swathed fly. And why choose? “Safe for who, for her to know?”

“For her, for us. It was an accident I ran into her today; we don’t need to guess at her alliances, and I’ve no idea what she knows.”

“By the time you get back, I will,” Evan promised, and ran a soft hand down his face. “Be off with you. I’ll paint her; that’ll keep her here with plenty of excuse to come back if necessary.”

Severus kissed his palm with warm eyes, before they went hard and worried and abstracted again, touched the wards, and apparated out. They came back on as soon as his hand disappeared.

Evan ended the muffling spell, and called, “You’d better come in if you don’t want me trying to make this tea after all. Which, truly, you don’t.”

“Where did Sev go?” she asked suspiciously.

“I made him go back to work,” he said. “It’s in no one’s interest for him to lose his job over running out in the middle of the day.” Not precisely true, but Narcissa could keep her knickers on and the Dark Lord could go jump in a lake. Plenty of people in Ev’s family would throw him something floaty if he found himself in difficulties, after all, and surely such a competent wizard could swim. “Don’t worry, I’ve promised him I’ll keep you safe, and I suppose that includes from myself.”

“Do I need to be kept safe from you?” she asked, hand on her wand.

“After what you pulled on Severus when he was at his lowest?” he replied affably. “The idea of burning your hair off does rather appeal.”

She looked down, but then she met his eyes, her jaw set. “I suppose someone who grew up knowing he’d have magic wouldn’t understand this,” she said, “but muggles have to accept they don’t have the power to save everyone they’d like to. If someone dives off a cliff and you don’t have a wand, diving after them won’t save them, it’ll just see you both broken.”

“There are so many things wrong with that analogy I wouldn’t know where to start,” Evan said, holding on fixedly to his tight smile. “However, since this isn’t what you’re here about, let’s leave it at _learned helplessness can be unlearned, you stupid Gryff_.”

“I suppose you thought all his friends were just _lovely_ people,” she fired back, crossing her arms over her bump.

“I’m his friend,” Evan said. “Narcissa and Regulus were his friends. Are his friends. Everyone you used to nag him about were just people he had to put up with and never be caught bad-mouthing in case someone imperiused him into throwing himself out a window.”

“Oh, come on,” she scoffed.

“That’s what he never understood about you,” he said, his smile tighter. “You’d go on and on about people being dangerous—people who really were dangerous—and never consider that dangerous means _dangerous,_ not mildly distasteful, and that they had easy access to him at night.”

She stared at him, disbelieving and disappointed that he should try such lameness on her. “You don’t really think,” she began, her voice flat and scolding.

“No, I don’t really think,” he said. “I really know. You’ve no _idea_ the tightrope he had to walk to stay friends with you without having a tragic accident. And that’s _with_ Cissa and me backing him up. The way you and that gang of your husband’s treated him, what he had to look forward to at home? No one who mattered would have questioned him offing himself. And he was never in a good position to begin with. Maybe up in the towers it’s different, but the only thing closer than him to the quintessence of everything our parents taught us to look down on with contempt and fear was you.”

She looked startled. “But… no one would _really_ have…”

“Merlin’s beard, woman,” he was unable to keep from expostulating crossly. “Take your blinkers off. Wizarding Britain is not some twinkly muggle fairyland. You landed in a sheltered corner, lucky you. Other places, there are riptides.”

The kettle whistled. They looked at it.

“I’m not allowed to touch that,” Evan admitted, startling a laugh out of her. He made sure not to let on he’d meant to.

“But you don’t think that way,” she said tentatively, shutting the flame off and taking the box of tea tins he handed her. “You couldn’t think like that, and… and be like that with him.”

“I’m bright enough to change my mind, given enough evidence,” he said dryly. “Not everyone is.”

“Are you dangerous?” she asked, looking at him squarely.

He raised a slow, quizzical eyebrow at her. “I’m a wizard. I can read.”

“Do you _want_ to be dangerous?”

“I dislike fuss, lamb,” he said, shaking his head at her directness. At least when Spike was that blunt, he either was doing it strategically or didn’t care about how he was answered.   “I can tell you grew up together,” he added, bringing out the teacups and things. “You speak alike. Want to risk his biscuits?”

Successfully diverted, she regarded the covered plate with appropriate suspicion. “What are they?”

“Didn’t ask,” he said, and took one. “I like to be surprised. …They’ve got rosemary in,” he told her after the first bite.

“In biscuits?!”

He shrugged. “He hasn’t got much of a sweet tooth.”

“He never did,” she agreed, and took one. “My husband will expect me back,” she added, and took a bite. Looking down at the biscuit, she commented, “Huh,” and took another bite. “This would be good with parmesan. Or stilton. Ooh, you could make a cheddar crust with it, for an apple tart.”

Evan winced, and begged the ceiling, “Merlin, _help_ , there are two of them.”

She giggled, but warned, “He will, though.”

“The building has an owlery downstairs,” he said. “Your excuse for being here is I’m doing you a prenatal portrait. Your bloke’s the possessive type, I’ve observed; it’ll make a good present for him. Or your parents, although I suppose your mum would prefer one with the baby already born. I can do one that wouldn’t come to life until she died, if you predeceased her, if you think she’d rather, although I can’t imagine any mother would, even a muggle… For the pre-madonna one for Potter, you’ll know best how to be cagy in a promising way without being suspicious. Or maybe in your world you just tell him? I don’t suppose you can pay for it,” he added hopefully.

She dimpled at him. He was immune, but welcomed the smile that showed she was relaxing with him. “Are you any good?”

“Darling,” he imitated Narcissa, “modesty forbids. You can poke around the studio, if you like, after we’ve settled your husband and worked out what Severus was in such a lather about.”

“Right,” she said, sobering. “I’ve only seen him like that when he thought his mum was in trouble.”

“Well,” he said lightly, refusing to look in the least grim, “let’s not assume it’s a catastrophe too quickly. Narcissa’s got New Mum syndrome, and she’s developed this _idée fixe_ that certified healers are rubbish. And they’re fighting tooth and nail to keep their funding, down at the lab. He’s been a bit overstretched. I suppose you know how he gets,” he finished without enthusiasm.

It would be a gross overstatement to say it killed him to know how well she knew how Spike got, but he wasn’t happy about it. She didn’t deserve to. He didn’t think she’d ever deserved to (although it was impossible not to be aware of how profoundly Spike disagreed), and he worried about what an impulsive, emotional bundle of self-righteous delusion like her might do with information like that. Show that she knew it but had failed to understand it was important, for example.

“He said something like that,” she noted. “I’ll write James, then, if you’ve a quill and parchment I can use.”

Once this was sorted out, the sofa transfigured to account for his guest’s gravidity, and the kettle reheated, Evan poured, distributed lemons and sugar appropriately, and looked at her expectantly.

“Cream In Tea Is An Abomination Unto God?” she asked knowingly.

“To the letter,” he agreed, and looked at her expectantly some more.

By the time she’d finished telling the story of the card reading, Evan completely understood why Severus had been so rattled. He even understood why he’d felt it necessary to bring the Evans bitch into Evan’s flat instead of solving the problem himself. It wanted finesse. Ev didn’t feel particularly confident about it, himself, and he wasn’t in the least surprised his blunt instrument had panicked.

“And all right,” she finished, seeming to feel the story was less creepy now that she was telling it in Evan’s cozy sitting room (she was _in Evan’s sitting room;_ he was going to have to open all the windows and burn a good cc of sandalwood and satsuma oils to stop it smelling like her rosewater and lilac perfume when she left; Evan’s silver-slate-blue and cherrywood flat where Severus breathed and slept and kissed Evan was _not allowed to smell like Lily Potter._ It was a real pity so many of his clients found that scent a relaxing one to have burning while they posed; he’d have quite liked to retire it now, although his version had thyme in), “I could see he really was spooked, not putting it on, but why on earth should it upset him that the baby’s going to be born at the end of July?”

“Ah,” Evan said, for something to say. He drank some tea and ate an entire biscuit by way of stalling. “Well.”

“Rosier?”

He had a very strong urge to duck it and paint her now, make her wait for her explanations until Spike got back. There was a reason, though, he reminded himself, that Spike had been willing to leave her to him.

Namely: Spike might just have been the worst outright-liar Slytherin had ever let graduate alive _._

“It’s like this,” he said finally. He was going to have to pensieve this later, so Spike would know word for word what he’d said, what he’d implied. “Did you know Severus applied for a job at the school recently?”

“ _Sev_ did?”

“I mentioned about the funding; it looked more likely to be cut at that point, and… long story short, yes. Dumbledore asked to meet him at the Hog’s Head, because he needed to meet someone else who was staying there.”

“I suppose it’s quieter than the Three Broomsticks,” she said with a note of distaste. “Not the nicest atmosphere, though.”

“That’s the important point,” Evan said grimly. His cousins could probably have seen he was faking the dire; Spike certainly could have. She wouldn’t know. “Because the person Dumbledore met, after him, spouted off a prophecy that may just have been genuine and almost certainly referred to, well…” He had to stop and try to remember what the Dark Lord was called by people who didn’t call him that. Waving a vague hand, he said, “You know who I mean; that wizard who took over the Knights of Walpurgis after old Mountjoy died, the one who took them Dark and then took them off the map. At least, he’s sure to think it means him. That type tends to think things mean them.”

“The one with the stupid French name,” she supplied, nodding.

“Oi,” he said mildly. “My name’s French, Evans. Er, Potter.”

“Lily’s fine,” she smiled. “So you think everyone in the Hog’s Head heard it?” she asked.

Evan shrugged. “Severus said it was avalanche-in-your-eardrum loud, until Dumbledore got the door shut. I’d be amazed if whatsisface hadn’t heard about it by now.”

“And what happens at the end of July?” she demanded, her hand curving over her belly.

“Well, that’s the thing,” Evan said. “Severus said that noise never came out of that witch, only it _did,_ and it wasn’t just her voice amplified, either, like it would have been if she’d been faking with a sonorus charm. So either it was a very good fake and meant nothing except she really, really wanted that job and ought to be on the stage, or it was a real Prophecy. You can never be sure you’ve interpreted those right until they’re fulfilled and it suddenly all makes sense in retrospect.”

“But?”

He shrugged. “There was a reference to ‘as the seventh month dies.’ As those of us who have brains and paid attention in History have been telling the overly excited, that doesn’t necessarily mean the end of July. But it’s the most obvious meaning.”

“Well, what happens whenever it is?”

“Again, subject to interpretation. But definitely the arrival of something that could potentially bring the subject of the prophecy down. And the word ‘born’ was used. Of course, the dominant characteristic of the silent E is that it’s silent, but such subtleties are often beyond… many people, actually, especially if they were home-educated before Hogwarts, which most of the people who are virulently anti-muggle and anti-muggleborn were. ”

He would have explained even if she hadn’t been looking at him as if she’d never heard the phrase, but it was convenient. Severus had said her family was ‘conventional,’ and rolled his eyes rather about it. Evan had asked, but the explanation hadn’t finished before they’d had to get to Arithmancy, and he hadn’t in any way cared enough to ask again.

“Tutors, some of them,” he elaborated, “but parents or varyingly literate elves for others. One of my roommates thought ‘spelling’ just means what you do with your wand, matter of fact; never could figure out why the Tartan kept marking him Dreadful when he did the practical work all right. Severus might have sorted it if he’d liked Avery a hundredth as much as you thought he did, but he goes a bit passive and unlikely to volunteer when people who used to beat him up for fun get him in trouble with his friends, even if they have a truce on.”

He revised his opinion of her intelligence slightly upwards: she’d gone pale twice over the course of that. Even though it had been delivered in Soothing Nattering form, and only once with the flustered indignation that means Denial is playing the opening set before Guilt comes on.

That would run its course only if he left it alone and didn’t give her an accusation to fight. So he swerved back on point and confirmed, “I expect Severus thinks that one of those not-very-clever people we were discussing earlier might decide that it’s in their best interest to act on the most obvious interpretation. Or in someone’s interest.”

“But whenever a Child of Prophecy prophecy gets fulfilled, it’s because the one they’re supposed to defeat makes an enemy out of them!” she protested. “Everyone knows that by now, don’t they?”

“That wizard we were discussing probably is old enough to know a thing or two, himself,” he agreed. “I don’t think Severus is, as a rule, comfortable betting on people behaving sensibly—or on people obeying orders they don’t like, or even _waiting_ for orders.”

“So as long as no one knows when I’m due,” she said, her mouth tight, “I’ve got until the baby’s born to make sure he’s safe, just in case someone decides to fixate.” She looked at him sharply. “How do I know I can trust you?”

He gaped at her. Realizing what an unattractive fish-face he was making, he stopped, and said incredulously, “ _You_ don’t trust me; you made my Spike _miserable!_ _He_ trusts me. He trusts me to put what’s important to him over justice. It’s do you trust _him_. On two counts: to be on your side, and to be right about me. So do you?”

“Don’t look at me like that!” she snapped. “This isn’t one of your Slytherin games, this is my baby!”

“E—Lily,” he said, more patiently, “what this isn’t is one of your Gryffindor games. You know, the kind with rules? Where sportsmanship and rules matter? You’re being shoved into the part of the world where the stakes are real and some of the players don’t give a damn about anything but their own power, or wealth, or safety. I’m sorry about that. No,” he answered her skeptical face levelly, “I really am; I didn’t say I was sorry was for your sake. Severus has enough to juggle without worrying about you, and he will.   But there it is. You’re going to have to do what he did, or you’re in serious, serious trouble.”

“Do what he did?” she asked, both arms wrapped around her bump now. She was lovely on his sofa, dark copper and white peach in spring green on the blue-grey suede that made Severus’s skin glow moonlit, felt so good against it he was willing to let it show (even this led to a lot of half-hearted complaints about keeping it clean) almost a hundredth as often as Evan would have liked.

Especially when she was looking so miserable and afraid and very nearly cowed (the Glas Gaibhleann). He wanted to paint her just like this, with those huge green eyes in her pale beating heart of a face, generous lips bleached by tumbling hair of a much deeper red than his, nearly auburn. He couldn’t help comparing those full lips and their beginnings of laugh lines to Spike’s thin ones, thinking of the near-theft of tribute, of gifts taken thoughtlessly by the very rich from the adoring ragged.

He had full lips himself. He told himself, very firmly, that he hadn’t met Spike until later; not till they were twelve, not _really_ met him _,_ not till Spike was who he was. Not till he already knew what he wanted from Evan and was quite prepared to sort-of-blackmail him to get it.

“Figure out that ‘fair’ and ‘decent’ and ‘justice’ and ‘honor’ are dreams,” he said, refilling their cups with an air of casual unconcern, even distant, nearly-sympathetic amusement. “Everything that human beings have made up is a dream. Money, beauty… definitely fairness. They’re rules we say we agree on, but even when we do really agree, people will cheat. Or pick one over another, when they clash. You can’t trust people to act on their ideals. People are moved by greed, hate, love, despair, fear, fellow-feeling.

“You can try to live up to your dreams yourself, fair enough,” he shrugged, smiling as if he thought her naïveté was cute and funny and not dangerously, shallowly self-centered, “good on you. Maybe you’ll succeed, most of the time. You can even hope others might. But if you _expect_ other people to live by their own ideals, let alone by yours, you’re sunk. Moving blind. It’s emotion drives us, mostly, choice to choice. And mostly, we’re blind to how we’re driven. Our hearts can overpower our brains, and sometimes they can be subtler, too.”

“Why do people follow him?” she asked, looking at the biscuits. “Sirius says it’s about blood purity, isn’t that an ideal?

He gave a snort of laughter. “You’re joking. That’s the definition of fear. The Other will change us, the Other will pollute my world, my world will no longer be so comfortable, it will become alien and I won’t know how to get along, my pond will be expanded so that I’m not such a big fish anymore, standards will decline or diversify so people will no longer automatically agree I am the best, I won’t understand everyone I meet anymore, maybe I won’t be _myself_ anymore.”

“Some of us,” she scowled, “have been through that. Oh, look! Still here.” He shrugged again. Disdainful, she demanded, “That’s it, then?”

He shrugged again. He was still here, too, and he wasn’t just clinging to an old self and old thoughts with desperate and manicured fingernails like hers (although there was nothing wrong with his manicurist), he was better for it.   He could tell because Narcissa and Reggie didn’t just expect him to be on their side for the important things now, they teased and whined at him, respectively, and Spike had moved _considerably_ on from thinking he was a tedious unpleasantness worth using.

Even his clients didn’t just want to use his talents and feel paid-attention-to; he got all kinds of information because they really seemed to _enjoy_ talking to him. Back before a maniac halfblood had turned his world eye-bending colors and worth looking at, he recalled, people had been kind and polite and generally treated him like a charming marble statue that might give them frostbite if they shook his hand. It hadn’t, in retrospect, been much fun, although he’d had no basis for comparison at the time.

“As I said,” he allowed, “that wizard is probably old enough and clever enough to know how to deal with people. Not everyone can be hooked with the same fly. It’s always the same, with any movement. Some believe in it, some think it’ll get them power, or freedom, or go along to get along, or can’t get free without abandoning someone they care about, or don’t realize what it really is until they’re in too deep to get free. With an old movement, some are born into it. With a secret movement, some just get caught up in the excitement of being part of a mystery.”

“That doesn’t sound like being driven by emotion,” she said, giving him a look that was technically a smile but was really too rueful.

“Really? I just described hope, love, curiosity, greed, fear, thrill-seeking, comfort-love, family loyalty, devotion to a dream.”

“You really liked History, didn’t you,” she said, her smile going quizzical. “Sound Ravenclaw, you do. ‘Always the same, with a movement.’”

He grinned at her, sly, and confessed, “I did my other homework in class and made Severus read me out his notes. And do you think he kept his opinions to himself? Anyone could pay attention to that.”

As she asked, “How did you get Sev do do that?” she dimpled again. He was beginning to suspect this was a favorite tactic of hers, with men. He could tell, because it was giving him the first twinges of the kind of not-really-physical headache he thought of as a Gilderoyalpain, the way it always did when clients Used Their Looks at him. You’d think they’d realize that painters looked at pretty people all the time and they ought to use a different hook if they actually wanted to catch his interest.

Not that it worked when they were intelligent enough to try; the best and most interesting person in the world, with the most interesting face in the world (well, the most interesting one _their age;_ he almost couldn’t wait except he was afraid age was only going to make him saggier, himself, instead of more riveting and fascinating and distinguished. Not that he really thought Spike was shallow enough to care or, humiliation, visually oriented enough to necessarily even notice as long as there weren’t any sudden changes, but it was going to get embarrassing eventually even if he kept fit) had snagged him for good before either of them had realized it, or had hormones, or even _liked_ each other.

Even before either of them had been someone the other would have liked now, really; Ev didn’t like to think back on the selfish, aimless piece of listlessness he’d been back in first and second year, and not just because living that way had felt, looking back, so cold and blue. And then Severus had (although he’d had every excuse, from stress and desperation to lack of resources and teaching) been a barbaric, undignified, frothing hysteric with no sense of strategy or proportion. Not pleasant people. But kids, as Severus so fondly put it, were uniformly horrible little monsters until they learned better, and sometimes the potential that was underneath the raw, grasping, selfishness and clumsiness showed through anyway.

Or, in Spike’s case, shoved through, and slammed you repeatedly in the face until you realized it was not, in fact, sunlight, closing the blinds on it wouldn’t help, and you might as well give up, have all the coffee in the world, and resign yourself to being an awake person for the rest of your life, who knows, you might learn to like it. Even to need it.

Evans wasn’t flirting because she wanted him, of course, she just needed his goodwill. Well, she had his protection, more or less, in broad terms, but she didn’t have his alliance, or his goodwill, or his cooperation, and she wasn’t getting _that_ answered, either. He waggled his eyebrows at her, because he wasn't going to admit to trading off sessions of Muggle fiction, even with a muggleborn. She wouldn’t see anything wrong with it, but he didn’t trust she even knew the _word_ discretion, so it might get out.

She giggled, “Ewww!” like a twelve-year-old.

“Milady,” he drawled, amusement on his face, which was something of an achievement, “you’re going to sit across from me with evidence of beddings past staring me in the face and say me ‘ew’?”

He knew all about Muggle prejudices. Whatever Spike said about Evan’s mum scaring him, he suspected it was really they that were responsible for Spike’s reluctance to formalize things with him. He couldn’t understand Bella’s eagerness for Muggle hunting, but sometimes it was nice to fantasize about punching them all in the face. Starting and ending with Tobias Not-Bloody-Enough Snape. He knew Severus wouldn’t let him, but couldn’t quite decide whether he thought Spike’s objection would be a matter of kneejerk blood-duty or of not liking to put Evan and violence in the same thought. He hadn’t asked, in case it was the latter. Disturbing Severus was the opposite of the point.

“Sorry,” she said, still giggling a little. “Just, it’s Sev. I can’t think about him like that, it’s like parents.”

“I really can’t believe he lets you crop off his name like that,” he said. He didn’t believe her, not completely, but it seemed like a reasonably sincere apology. Mollified enough to be going on with, he leaned back with another biscuit. They weren’t a Spike Spectacular, but they weren’t at all bad. Anyway, he hadn’t had lunch yet.

“Oh—well, I don’t,” she said, taking one, too. “Up until we went to Hogwarts it was only his mum called him Severus, and then only in private when she was mad at him, and the rest of the time she had her pet name for him, you know how mums are.” Evan knew how house elves were when they were raising you, anyway, which probably amounted to the same thing. “Everyone else called him Seth; that’s what’s on his muggle birth certificate. That’s how I was introduced to him.”

He nodded; this wasn’t new to him. “But you call him Sev,” he pointed out.

She gave a shrug and smile. “Sev’s not the only one as came to Hogwarts wiv more of a home accent than he lef’ wiv,” she said, making Evan blink. It wasn’t just the change in her own voice. Severus’s was so addictively plugged into his blood now, so sly and earnest and somber and dark-waters and velvet-deep Turkish coffee with chocolate in, he’d very nearly forgotten what a harsh, flat, childishly-shrill tangle it had been, first year.

“Easier to keep it up at school than switch back and forth every summer, since everyone would assume it _was_ short for ‘Severus.’” she went on. “I expect that’s what his mum had in mind, actually; make sure his names sounded enough like each other he’d answer to them both.”

He nodded again. Mrs. Snape had, he knew, hoped that using her father’s name would flatter him enough to be reconciled to a half-blood grandson. Using a single name that would pass easily between worlds hadn’t been as good an option. It had nearly worked, for a while, too, once Severus had shown his magic, until he’d shown his colors were silver-green.

“The thing I don’t understand is,” she said (Evan decorously refrained from giving voice to the Spike in his head silkily congratulating her on there only being one thing), “why would he tell me to go to Professor Dumbledore?”

It was all Evan could do not to raise an incredulous eyebrow at her. He hoped, for the sake of his opinion of Severus’s taste in people worth risking himself for, that she merely hoped Evan was an ignorant fool who didn’t know about her passel of Grindelwald War veterans and reckless lion cubs. “Well,” he said. “Dumbledore does know the prophecy already, and he’s a wizard with frankly embarrassing levels of power and resource.”

“Yes, I know _that,_ but Sev’s been horrible about him as long as I can remember.”

“I wonder why,” Evan said dryly, because it would be too obviously disingenuous to make a pretense about Spike and anger. “He’s taking some postgraduate study from him; Slughorn didn’t want to interrupt his vacation, I suppose. I gather they’re getting along better now your husband and his chums aren’t part of the conversation.”

“But that’s wonderful!” she said, her face lighting. The professional part of Evan’s brain noted that she really was extremely pretty, and that he would probably enjoy painting her more than he wanted to. Especially if she didn’t take advantage of knowing he’d do it just for Spike’s peace of mind, and paid him. Being taken advantage of was irritating, when you knew you’d be prevented from turning it back on the wretched user later. Which he would, because Spike would be upset about it.

The part of him that always spoke in Spike’s voice was yelling, _No, you stupid cow, it’s the blast that opens Armageddon, and would you for Merlin’s sake suss out people are not their friends; he doesn’t become Dumbledore now any more than he used to be Mulciber!_    The part that knew he was stuck with his father’s inheritance said, _it’s terrible, it’s dangerous, it’s a temptation he’s too hungry for warmth to resist, it’s trouble, trouble, trouble._

But there was one more part of him, one that had simmered sweetly and tranquilly for two years and then wrenched to life in an incandescent howl of tender outrage one black Spring night in their fifth year.  That part of Evan, the part of him that that knew in his bones that blood was everything, everything—and, compared with family, nothing at all—whispered, _yes.  Yes, it’s options.  Yes, choice is power.  Yes, power is hope._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Albus has a lot to sort out. If only all of it were simply confusing and complicated!
> 
>  **Notes** : the Glas Gaibhleann is a legendary white cow with green spots with an inexhaustible supply of milk, associated with prosperity.


	46. Headmaster's Office, Hogwarts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Albus has a lot to sort out. If only all of it were simply confusing and complicated!

"...And then Sev came back and said I had to come straight to you, sir, and not tell anyone else. Even James! Which I thought was a bit rich of him," Lily added in belated indignation. "I had to argue for half an hour to convince him James would suspect if I came straight to you instead of spending the night at home."

"Good heavens," Albus said softly. "Tell me exactly what Mr. Rosier said regarding who heard this prophecy?"

"He said the oracle was very loud until you'd shut the door," she frowned at him, puzzled but obedient. "Well, he said 'pretty damned loud.'"

"Good heavens," he said again. It bore repeating.

The powers that had spoken through Sibyll Trelawney had been tolerably loud, it was true. But:

1\. The door had been closed from the outset.

2\. No one in the tavern had heard anything but Aberforth and Severus falling all over each other down the stairs, much less the everything Rosier had implied they had.

3\. Even if they had, he and Aberforth had taken away from them all the few minutes of import. Severus must have guessed that they would, and in any case, Albus knew they had spread no gossip for Rosier to hear.

Rosier, then, had been lied to, or was lying. About how much? He asked, "And about what these listeners know?"

"He didn't say exactly—he said there'd been something about the seventh month dying, and a Child of Prophecy prophecy, or something being borne with an E to someone, maybe, maybe by boat or something like that. He said he and Sev had been trying to convince the people who jump to conclusions that it might not mean what they thought it sounded like."

"Confusion now hath made his masterpiece," Albus quoted, still softly. "My dear, if any of that is in the least bit true, your friend is playing a most dangerous game."

Because Aberforth had heard it all, although he no longer remembered any of it and hadn't wanted to. The Slytherin, with his younger ears and unfortunate but excellent training in awareness of his surroundings, must have as well. And there was no way to interpret the whole prophecy as having anything but a living being at its heart. The only way that Lily's story made any sort of sense at all was if Severus had passed on at least part of his story to more people than her and young Rosier—and lied through his teeth about it to someone.

By now, Albus would have had to spin quite a convoluted story to convince himself there was any possibility that Severus was a free man. Oh, but if Lily wasn't the only one to believe a false story! And how could she be, when Severus had sent her to Albus, who he seemed not to believe to be a complete fool, and who had also been there that night? Far more likely that he (or he and Rosier) had been keeping their story consistent.

Perhaps, in part, so Albus would know exactly what tale had been spun for Tom? He wouldn't dare to hope it.

Yet.

She didn't seem to understand what he meant (how could she?) and was frowning thoughtfully, one fine line between her coppery eyebrows. "He did have a panic attack. I mean, he hugged Rosier right in front of me and everything, so he must have been completely out of his mind. I haven't seen him that bad since his—since that time his mum was really hurt."

"Perhaps he appreciates the danger," Albus said. He had no trouble guessing who had hurt Eileen, and was the sadder for it. She had come through her troubles, though, and with not only her mind and heart but her pride intact. "But I wonder whether he knows how much of his hand he's shown." This was mostly to himself.

"What do you mean, sir?" she asked.

He regarded the young woman in front of him, glowing with health, with color, with magic, with new life. With hope in the future so confident that it wasn't hope, but only a lack of fear. It would be a crime to dim a soul like hers unnecessarily with machinations. "I understand, Lily," he questioned her, "that before today, it had been several years since you'd called Severus a friend?"

She looked away and then back, her mouth firm. "That's right, Professor."

"Why did you break with each other?"

"I just couldn't be friends with him anymore," she said, sad. "They'd… they'd laid a claim on him, those awful people in Slytherin. And he wasn't fighting it. I'd been begging him to fight it for years, and he just kept on and on sticking up for them, saying the kinds of things they say. And they kept pulling him closer and tighter. There was a point where I knew there wasn't any use fighting what he was becoming if he wouldn't fight them with me. I couldn't just keep being friends and watch while he turned into one of them."

He kept looking at her encouragingly, in case there was anything she was keeping back.

It worked. After a fidgety moment, she burst out angrily, "He wasn't who I thought he was. I never thought he was such a coward. I never thought he was such a coward he wouldn't stand up for what was right."

"Ah, Lily," Albus said, shaking his head with a little smile. "My shining young lioness, there are more kinds of courage than one. It's strength to stand and fight as a standard-bearer—but it takes strength, too, to crouch in the dark with all the demons, and wait for the perfect shot."

She looked taken aback. "Is that what you think he's been doing? All this time?"

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Did he tell you that he and I have been seeing something of each other, of late?"

"Rosier did."

Albus nodded. "It is, I believe," he told her, "something that the young man I've recently met would be capable of. Whether or not it's what he has been doing… Tell me, Lily—and tell me, as well as you can, what observation tells you, stripped of hope or despair for him, and certainly of what you think I hope to hear."

She nodded uncertainly.

"Presume that you did know him, and as well as you thought you did, before he became badly torn between you and his housemates. Think back to that boy, and to the man you met today. What do you think?"

He hoped she'd say that yes, Severus could be patient and brave in that way and maybe was, had been. Not that it would tell Albus anything about the boy, either way. If she thought so, though, or could be convinced to, it would make her (and, by extension, her husband and his friends) much easier to deal with, should he be able to bring Severus firmly under his wing.

She thought for a long time, her generous mouth small in distress, and finally shook her head. "I don't know," she said unhappily. "I always used to think he was brave, and he seemed so much less… cramped and twisted and sour than he was at school. And I'd love to think he's as smart as I used to think he was, that they never really fooled or brainwashed him. But when I think about Sev having that much patience, or self-control! Any!"

He chuckled. "I confess, after all my meetings with him in his student days, I've been most surprised, lately, by his self-possession. Perhaps it's merely that the relative solitude has given him the chance to re-weave frayed nerves."

"James was completely horrible back then," she agreed, making no bones about it. "I keep thinking, though; he's changed for the better. So much. So people can change. So is Severus a better man than he used to be, or just a better liar?"

"Without compelling evidence," he said, "we must rely on instinct until time reveals enough to be certain. What does your instinct tell you? The person whose fear you saw today: who was that fear for? Is he a creature of darkness or of love?"

He saw Severus shaking in her eyes, frozen and freezing with foresight, clinging to his handsome young flatmate as though he had no other world, breaking his workday to long-sufferingly indulge his friend's maternal fretting, kicking Lily's ankle by way of a shyly inept olive branch, over and over to reassure himself she was letting him—and younger, ready to sleep at his tormenters' door if it gave him a chance to clutch at her robes and grovel. Younger still, already touchy and skinless but bursting to share his wonders with anyone who'd just give him a smile, an ear, a willing eye.

Slowly, a tension went out of her shoulders. "Well… when you put it like that. But," she looked up sharply, tight with worry again, "what if it's both?"

He twinkled at her brightly, to her surprise. Behind him, Fawkes cheeped, too young to sing. "Then," he said happily, "the battle is, at least, not lost."

Unconvinced but heartened, Lily smiled tentatively back at him.

A house elf popped into the room. Always wide, her eyes looked like they might fall right out of her head. "Master Headmaster sir!" she squealed.

"Yes, Bonnie, what is it?" Albus asked kindly.

"Missy Minister is calling, Master Headmaster! She is saying frost giants is attacking Orkney!"

Albus was taken back by the sheer unexpectedness of it. He recovered swiftly, though, and rose. He held out a hand, summoning a broom to take him beyond the Apparition barrier. He didn't need it, but a spare broom might be welcome when he arrived, and there was no sense wasting energy fighting the castle at the beginning of what promised to be a very long afternoon. "Lily, I must ask you not to accompany me."

Her hands drawn to the swell of her child, Lily nodded. "What can I do?"

"Floo anyone you can reach and ask them to follow me; owl any of ours and any of the faculty who aren't at home or work. The faculty's vacation addresses are by the tin of floo powder. Ask Madame Pomfrey instead to prepare the infirmary in case of overflow, and then join you at St. Mungo's. If she protests, remind her the Aurors will have brought field mediwizards. If St. Mungo's is not yet expecting casualties, explain matters. If they judge it wise for you and Alice to assist them in your condition, do so. Please don't argue you can do more if they think it best for you to sterilize bandages or some such; someone must do these things, and you would be freeing errand-flyers. And Lily…"

Halfway to the fireplace already, as he was himself poised on the windowsill, she turned to him.

"Leave telling your husband and his friends of this other matter to me. I fear Severus's involvement may make them… inflexible, and I must know more before I can address their concerns."

"That's one word for it, concerns," Lily agreed with a sigh, and turned back to the floo.

"And don't let Fawkes follow me," Albus added, with a sympathetic smile at his old friend. The phoenix was cheeping with indignation at not having been tucked into Albus's hat-brim for the flight, but his tears weren't yet strong enough to make it worth risking an early rebirth for him. "He's far too young this month." He kicked off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Lord Voldemort's New Groove (encourages office politics)


	47. Undisclosed, Later

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Dark Lord is stepping up his game. And also his other game, which is called Office Politics. Some Death Eaters are better at it than others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings** : see chapter summary
> 
>  **GAME!** : Have you seen Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan be ridiculously adorable playing the Newlywed Game on youtube? I have. So I'm going to offer you guys the chance to ask the characters questions, and I'll let them answer at the end of the next chapter. If it goes well (ie: if people actually wanna play), we may make it a regular feature. The rules this chapter will be a straight-up copycat: questions for Evan and/or Severus about each other.

When Evan answered the summons, he found he wasn't the only one who'd been called. This was practically unheard of, and everyone else looked as surprised as he did.

Naturally, he looked for Severus first, Severus being a far more likely summonee than Ev was. His partner had a grim and grayish cast and was speckled with blood, but he only looked tired, not hurt. When Evan caught his gaze, he widened his eyes expressively, communicating nothing Evan found terribly worrying.

"Gather, my faithful," the Dark Lord said in a quiet voice that carried easily.

They formed a loose semicircle around him: Evan, Severus, Lucius, Bella, Rodolphus, Wilkes, Regulus, and a few of Voldemort's older followers. Not everyone Evan knew about by a long shot, and one or two who were strangers to him. Barely a split second's further eye contact had Ev and Spike heading for opposite ends of the horseshoe so they could see each other's faces. Spike was between Regulus (for moral support) and Wilkes (most likely so he could kick her if necessary, although Ev knew that he wouldn't grumble and snark about her as much as he did if there weren't any fondness there).

Evan stood next to his father largely because it was expected of him. He didn't object to the welcoming squeeze around his shoulders before they gave all their attention to their Lord, though.

"Just as I will not spare time today to summon you all individually," the Dark Lord said, "so we will be brief. Lay your wands on your Marks."

Evan cocked an eyebrow at Severus, who nodded almost imperceptibly. They were agreed, then: Voldemort looked neither discomfited nor displeased.

They all had to reaffirm, on their marks and on pain of pain, their loyalty to the Dark Lord, the Cause (this, as the first time, was left undefined), the Knights of Walpurgis, their commitment to guarding each others' backs from blah, blah, blah, everything they had already sworn, bindingly, when they'd been marked in the first place. It was right offensive, Evan thought resignedly, droning along with everyone else's intense recitation as the magic built and tightened. He supposed Voldemort just _had_ to be dramatic as he went into a new phase.

Then, too, it was probably no bad thing for them all to see the others doing it. No hooded robes or anything. He straightened partway though and shaped up, even before Spike's glare from across the circle got serious.

His father clapped him commiseratingly on the arm afterwards, and then patted the flask at his own belt. Sotto voice, he explained and suggested, "Coffee. On me all times."

Glad to have been misunderstood, Evan nodded.

"Lestrange," the Dark Lord said, and Rus stepped forward, trying not to grin but not succeeding very well. Voldemort put on a proprietary smile that made his face look waxy (Evan managed not to let his throat tighten, but some faces were just _made_ for smooth propriety and should not try to be all warm and Huffish) and noted, "I hardly need ask you how you succeeded."

"Thank you, Lord."

"Did they demand any promises?"

Reggie and Wilkes looked surprised at this confirmation that the attack on the Orkneys had been deliberate. Everyone else had picked up on Voldemort's mood already. Lucius was clumsy enough to look smug, as though he thought he was the only one who'd figured it out. He probably did.

"I just lured them on with the smell of blood, my Lord. Didn't have to talk to them at all."

"Excellent," Voldemort said, and Rodolphus beamed. "Find out if they can be similarly tempted again. If they cooperate, make sure they are well and safely fed, but set them only on animals until we can be certain they will perform reliably. If they resist a second temptation, observe them carefully without being observed. Learn what they want."

Rus bowed, and stepped back into the circle.

"Avery." The father of the Avery who'd roomed with Evan and Spike at school stepped forward. "The state of the Ministry?"

"Flabbergasted," he smirked. "In contact with Norway, investigating the area. Otherwise running in circles, mainly."

Evan and Severus looked at each other again, and he could see his own thought in Spike's eyes: their own Avery must have gotten his brains from his mum, or maybe they'd skipped a generation. He would have thought a word like 'flabbergasted' meant something dirty.

"Good. Do not draw attention to yourself." Avery stepped back with a bow, and Voldemort called on a fellow called Nott who'd been in Bella's year at school. Evan didn't know him well. "The opinion of the Prophet?"

"We're still investigating, my Lord. There isn't a unified opinion yet."

"See that when there is, the opinion is that the world is a dangerous and chaotic place in which anything might happen, for which better preparation is needed than the Ministry can provide."

"Yes, my Lord."

"Snape." Evan's stomach clenched on principle. "Why do you come in blood? Did you join the defenders?"

"No, my lord, I was at St. Mungo's when the injured began arriving," Severus said, stepping up. "I came straight from there; had to fake collapse to get away. Not suspicious, everyone's getting to that point," he hastened to assure Voldemort's frown. "No one escaped helping."

"Did you try?"

Severus swallowed, and raised his chin a little. "No, sir. That would have stood out."

"Good," Voldemort said. Evan relaxed more than Spike did. "Continue to display goodwill and dependability. Are you in a position to hear the hospital gossip?"

Spike looked slammed with failure. Evan wanted to hug him. Also to smack him around the head or tickle him until he got too annoyed to keep beating himself up for not being a completely different person.

On the other hand, Voldemort was looking indulgent, so who was Ev to dictate the cobra's tactics?

"Not really, my lord," he admitted. Then he jerked up a little in realization and said, "I know someone who might be, though."

"See to it. Beyond that, all as before." Severus bowed, slid Lucius a brightly sly look (Lucius looked confused. Ev would have crowed if they'd been somewhere safe. It was about time Spike found a way to get Cissy to stop pestering him at work), and rejoined the circle. Wilkes's hand moved behind his back, low, and he stepped on her foot. Both of them maintained expressions of clear-eyed attention, their faces fixed on the Dark Lord. "Snape?"

He stepped forward again, although not as far. "Sir?"

"Your concern for promptness is laudable, but in future if a charm will suffice to make you presentable, you may use it."

Evan's throat went tight, but he needn't have worried. Severus's face looked as though it was flushing; all the muscles moved in the right ways; but it didn't actually change colors. Of course it didn't: unlike the muscle movements involved in a blush, actually flushing wasn't something one could decide to do. His body canted slightly towards Bellatrix, which was a tell they were going to have to work on preventing, but he didn't look at her. He kept his face slanted enough away from her, in fact, that Evan was sure she didn't see his eyes glowing in amused gratitude at Voldemort as he very resentfully said, "Thank you, my Lord," and when he cleaned himself up he not only used his wand but remembered to speak the incantation under his breath.

Evan didn't ruin it for him by having an expression, of course. Rodolphus could have mucked things up with his little snort, but even though Bella knew Rus liked Severus, since he was her husband and rather worshipped her in most spheres (Ev had never been so crass as to ask whether he called her Kali or Morrígan in bed) she was sure to misinterpret it. And since he _did_ like Severus Ev was sure he wouldn't actually explain; he just hadn't been brought up to keep his face disciplined in the way that was the ideal for Southern pureblooded families. Which might have been why he and Bella got along; she had no use for it, except as the occasion dictated.

"Those of you I have addressed so far: I will call you tomorrow for more detailed reports. If there is some time during which you cannot be called without suspicion, remain behind and tell me. Do not bother me with your working hours, Nott, Snape; I know them already."

"Bellatrix." She stepped forward eagerly, like a horse coming to the starting line. "Dolohov." A gentleman Evan had never seen in person before joined her, although he had seen pictures. Mulciber's family had visited him in the summer before sixth year; he thought Mulciber was working with the man now, but one didn't discuss such things overtly. "Take your cohorts and begin to pick off the blood-traitors and the mudbloods. I wish _no more than two incidents in the next fortnight_ which cannot be explained away as anything but acts of terror. Let them disappear, let them have accidents, let them be," he smirked, "mugged, if they are so foolish as to walk among muggles."

A breath of amusement ran around the circle. Evan wondered who else was dutifully joining in without finding it particularly funny.

"You will not," his voice descended like a whip, chopping it off, "be obvious, or hasty, or careless. Begin _slowly._ Bellatrix, you will have to do without your husband and young Black; they will both have other duties. Is the Crouch boy teachable?"

"Very, Lord," she said. It was almost a smirk, but more of a glow.

"Then bring him in too deeply to think of retreat. The two of you will return tomorrow to present me with a plan of locations to hit without showing any hint of a pattern. Coordinate your efforts. Black, Malfoy."

Reggie's oval face was a perfect white cipher, where Lucius oozed just a bit too much assurance to be believed, as usual.

"Make yourselves useful to the Ministry. Black, make your family useful." Reggie looked daunted, and Evan didn't blame him. No one told Reggie's mum to do anything. He gave a little fingers-only wave to attract Reggie's attention, and then a little I'll-help nod. He felt his father's hand rest lightly on his back, and smiled. If his father aimed Mum at Uncle Orion and Granddad, that would help a lot. Quite possibly they wouldn't need to involve Aunt Walburga at all, which would be very much for the best.

"Malfoy, continue your investments in goodwill. Black, Malfoy and your father know how; learn from them. Show the Ministry how eager you are to step up in this time of trouble. And I wish you, as well, to assist Bellatrix in her planning—your planning only, Bellatrix—and Snape in his studies. These duties should not conflict," his warning glance was for Bella, not Reggie, "but remember first and foremost that I hold you as responsible for Snape's progress as I hold him."

Severus's mouth thinned at Reggie new status as hostage for his advancement in a craft he was having to teach himself from books, which couldn't actually be learned from books. Evan made a note to have a word with him later about allowing himself to show genuine displeasure and worry in a place like this, but couldn't really blame him.

Voldemort waved the gulping Reggie back, but not Lucius. "Both of you Rosiers, and you, Mulciber." Like Avery, it wasn't Evan's classmate who had come, but a parent. A mother, in his case. At least, Evan thought it was his mother; Mulciber looked like both his parents and hadn't ever mentioned which witch had given birth to him. "Do you four need instruction?"

Evan shook his head with the rest. Working out what was wanted from what Evan knew already wasn't exactly hard.

"Tell me, then, Evander."

So it was because Bella was the second Lestrange in the room that he'd used her first name, not as a mark of special favor. Ev could see Spike very quietly enjoying that fact, but he could see Bella's brow darkening, too. He just hoped that the only reason he could see Spike's subtle hint of schadenfreude was because he knew him so well.

The problem was that Bella had a _thing_ about Spike, mostly but not entirely having to do with Her Babies Were HER BABIES. Which they hadn't been, not the way she liked to think they were, in years.

Ev didn't think Reg _loved_ Severus better than Bella, as Bella half-feared could come to happen someday, or respected him more, but he was a lot more comfortable with him. And Bella was right about Narcissa, which was her own fault for being overbearing at someone just as prideful as she was. Then, of course Severus's blood-status was (whatever Narcissa liked to think) a cold fact. Which she found, in proximity to her relatives and herself, intolerable, and it drove her mad that her husband thought she was overwrought about the whole business and Severus was all right really.

It also drove her mad that Severus tended to react drolly to her frustration instead of with terror. If she thought him clever enough to pick up that she'd thought herself more honored than she was, she'd also think he was enjoying her embarrassment whether he gave her a reason to or not. Even though Severus had been dinged first…

Privately worried about her but not intimidated by being put on the spot, he said "We are to listen with both ears, my Lord, and insinuate the same beliefs as will Mr. Nott."

"You are," Voldemort said. Apparently Evan didn't rate a 'good.' He was not heartbroken. "I trust, Lucius, that your good lady will do the same." Lucius bowed, and the Dark Lord nodded. They all stepped back. "Wilkes? Do you need instruction?"

Wilkes grinned fiendishly, and then faltered and clutched Spike's arm and fluttered. "Oh, I—I—I just need _reassurance_ , my Lord, things are getting so scary out there, it's dimming my natural adorable vivacity so! If only some strong man," she clutched very obviously tighter, looking adoringly at Spike, "who _really knows,_ could make me believe, really _believe_ that everything's being done that can be done…"

A highly disturbed Spike tried to edge away from her without yanking, to her evident glee. It was one of those moments that made you notice she only came to his collar, even in the ridiculous and terrifying shoes that no one sane would try to walk in.

"Good," the Dark Lord nodded again, lips curled in a kindly smile that didn't suit him. He dropped it, and waved a languid hand. "Those with nothing urgent to communicate may go."

Evan only just saw Spike turning to speak with Reggie before his dad pulled his attention away with a casual clap on the shoulder. There wasn't going to be an out-loud 'well done,' but Ev didn't need one. "Come have tea this weekend. Your mother wants to know about Lammas."

"Sunday?" Ev asked. His father nodded, waved at Voldemort like the old friend he was and got a gracious nod back, and apparated out.

Ev glanced back at Spike, who had let Reg go to Bella and was now talking to Lucius. He started to cross to them, but got a go-on-I-follow signal. He wasn't thrilled about that. The Dark Lord had seemed pleased enough with Severus, though, so he probably wouldn't let Bella claw his face off.


	48. #18 Dye Urn, Later

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which all matters of import are strenuously avoided (except with future Ministers), and it is decided who is allowed to make cocoa and who is never ever ever allowed in the kitchen again because oh god. Also who should never have been allowed to read Byron in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : discussions of really very nasty violence and, at the other end of the spectrum, Evan's imagination. Also, actual slash. And UST. And nitpickery which would have been quite useful at the time. And Grenade Balm. And horrible Byron abuse. Basically a crawful of nauseating fluff.
> 
>  **Character Interviews!**  
>  The theme for your questions this week is: Ask any of the characters about any of the Houses (not about individuals in the Houses, although characters might well go there on their own). It's fine to e.g. ask Minerva a question about Hufflepuff (though I'm not sure how well-thought-out an answer you'd get in that particular case if it didn't have to do with administration), and creative/cracky questions are encouraged. ^_^
> 
> Now and going forwards, 'any character' means any who's gotten to show who they are onscreen at some point in the series. I'm not including, eg, the newly-introduced Death Eaters from the last chapter; they haven't been on before and were being formal and public-face and Appropriate then. Well, Bella's public-face isn't all that formal or appropriate, but you get the idea.
> 
> If you want to ask Professor Snape a question, please specify what year's version you're asking—and be aware that I'm not giving spoilers here any more than anywhere else. Other teachers will answer from 1980, as they haven't changed their various approaches much since the '70s. Whether or not they ought to have. Yes, you may ask Spike and Professor Snape to both answer the same question. Because occlumency. :D
> 
> I'm also still happy to take questions for Severus and Evan about each other (whether they're happy is another matter), and follow-up questions are fine.

"Well," Evan toasted Severus with an amber glass when the door opened, "here we go."

"I thought you were an excellent-vintage-or-die-peasant man," Spike said, hanging up his summer cloak.

"I _appreciate_ wine," he explained.

Spike winced, dropping down beside him. Ev was very glad he'd cleaned himself up, but the way a spell did it just didn't smell the same as either his working or his evening soap. Also, it made his hair a bit fluffy in a way he hated and Ev wanted to get his hands into, and he didn't look in the mood, which was vexing. "Please don't start getting drunk for reasons other than fun," he said wearily. "You know why I hate that."

"Just marking the occasion," Evan assured him, pulling his Spike against his side. "Want a glass? Or we can switch to tea, if you'd rather make some."

"Reggie's coming by once Bellatrix is finished with him…" He took a sip, though, and made a pleased noise before handing it back.

"Does she know that?"

"I expect she will."

"Then he won't be here till midnight, Spike."

"She stalks in malice and in spite," Severus mused, with a sudden, gleeful _if you knew how much fun I'm having right now you'd hit me_ glint, "And blood-drenched robes and hopeless cries, And all that's insecure and dark Covetous sparks from slaten eyes."

"…Yes, all right," Evan admitted reluctantly. "But I don't think 'slaten's a word."

"No," Severus admitted back. "I could have gone with 'tomb-grey,' but when eyes are called 'grey' it implies a lighter shade than that really odd almost charcoal color she has—"

"Really odd? Spike, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Englishmen don't have black eyes unless someone punches them."

"Well, there you are."

"…Oh, _Spike_."

Spike shrugged callously. "Normally 'green' eyes aren't the shade Lily's are, either, and red hair isn't as close to _red_ as hers is; if it was any closer it would look dyed. Yours looks, in fact, like you spend as many hours at the salon getting what do you call them, highlights?"

"I do have good highlights," he agreed matter of factly, because he did. He was going to have to seriously bleach once he started going grey, unless Severus could make him some really excellent dye. Going crystal-white like Dumbledore would be acceptable, that would be striking and dignified and he probably had the complexion to carry it off, but _fading_ , or going patchy, ugh.

"Well, as much time on your hair as Lockhart does trying to imitate it."

"He does not. I mean, not to—no, that's, no."

Severus looked at him kindly, but didn't actually pat him on the head. Evan stared at him in pathetic horror. "You really didn't know?"

"He doesn't look anything like me!" Ev protested.

"I know," Severus agreed, radiating a whole bland universe of amusement with him and even more smug _HA my bloke is emulatable he's mine_ , which Evan did, despite his distress, appreciate, "but he tries fearfully hard."

"He uses curlers! Reggie told me he uses curlers! I don't have curly hair!"

"It sort of waves a bit," Severus said analytically, and shrugged.

"He has _short_ hair, Spike _._ "

"Well, one doesn't care to be _seen_ to be trying to imitate other people."

" _Teeth!_ "

"They are freakish," Spike agreed with malicious cheer. "Positively Hollywood."

"…Is that a dryad thing?"

"Muggle American artificial mouth-torture cosmetic surgery thing which you don't want to know about and Bellatrix probably does but we shan't tell her."

"I… don't see and I'm now very pleased about it?"

"Precisely. _And,_ back to sight, the sorts of blue eyes you and Dumbledore and Narcissa and Lockhart have are all equally unlikely to be what's usually meant when anyone talks about blue eyes. Then there's that odd silver-grey Luke and Draco have, and I swear to god there is no creature on earth over the age of five and without Veela blood with hair like Luke's, and have you noticed that the Dark Lord's eyes are so red a brown they're almost wine-colored in the right light? I thought it was a cider-color once, but actually it's very nearly burgundy. Clearly magic does odd things to coloration, there it is, give up."

"All right," Evan laughed, kissing the corner of his mouth. Well, it started out there.

"As I was saying," Severus said happily, when they'd pulled back again, "the tomb-bit makes one think matte when actually they've got that unceasing zealous glint. You get a bit of that with the slate, I suppose, as well, although that at least shines when it's wet… all right, I'll work on it."

"Not on my account," Ev begged, wincing at what would happen if Bella noticed him composing irreverent verse about her fanaticism in his head and came to an accurate-enough conclusion about his expression. "Why did you tell him to come, anyway? It could be two in the morning by the time Bella lets him go."

"Because he's only coming once Bellatrix lets him go."

"Good point, well made. I move we work up the perfect toddy to ply him with when he gets here."

"Suits me," Spike shrugged and, swinging himself over Evan's lap, stole his glass.

"Hullo," Evan remarked, sliding his hands up Severus's lean sides.

"Wouldn't it have been more polite to say that when I got in?"

"And you'd know polite if it bit you," Evan smiled.

Spike bounced his eyebrows at him, spine loosening as the firewhiskey warmed him. He seldom had more than a glass of cider or wine with supper, and more often had shrubs when they were at home. That and being chronically underfed made him a bit of a lightweight for his height, and certainly for someone who called himself a brewer. Especially when he wanted to be.

Ev wasn't complaining, although he refused to try the shrubs. He considered voluntarily drinking anything with vinegar in it to be a sign of clinical insanity.

Not that there weren't plenty of other signs. "Try it and see, Polite," Severus was inviting him now, lips gone all curly and eyes so lazy it was impossible to tell the irises from the lashes. Surely it was crazy to invite someone to bite you? Evan had a recurring nightmare about having to live without any crazy in his life. _He_ didn't have any, not of his own.

Well, a touch of the Black kind, of course, but that didn't show up in good times and wasn't any fun. Spike had his own version of that, and he didn't think he was any fun, either. Ev tried not to laugh at him out loud too much. A grumpy _you're mocking me_ Severus was excellent fun, but didn't hold a candle to a Spike who felt safe and relaxed and unguarded enough to twine slyly all over Evan and use his shirt for evil.

By the time they were decorous and clean and dry and had warming and re-filling charms on four little tasting pitchers they'd put together, there was still no sign of Reggie. Ev wasn't surprised. He fully expected Bella to keep Reg until he was half asleep, just to spite Spike.

"What was that look you gave Lucius about?" Evan asked, mostly to see if Severus was able to scrabble for consciousness while having his temples rubbed after a long day and several taste tests of hot scotch drinks (firewhiskey was a terrible mixer with practically everything), the featherweight.

After Evan had reacted appropriately to the completely _unfair_ groggy humming noise Spike made trying to wake up enough to understand the question — and Neil Fudge had taken (reasonably patient, moderately amused) umbrage and come up to pound on the door — and they'd finished apologizing for forgetting the silencing charms and hastily re-cleaned up and had him and Sue in for a taste-test and a somber discussion of the attacks — Evan tried again.

"Oh," said Severus, obviously and pathetically glad of a distraction from trying to pretend he wasn't bright red or flustered and didn't care and snow wouldn't thaw in his mouth and he never spoke above an indifferent drawl. Evan, who _actually_ didn't care except to be rather smug, was mostly trying not to smile at him so fondly he actually died of humiliation. "Well… if I can tell Narcissa that someone has to gossip with them and it's her or me, she might be more amenable to using the maternity healers instead of pretending it's a specialty I have."

As he'd thought. "That's my Naj," he said approvingly. "She's still going to make you double-check everything they do, though."

"At least until she admits they're competent," Spike allowed. "But I might be able to get her to go to them first and not haul me out of work by the hair all the time the moment Draco sneezes."

"Want me to encourage it?"

"I don't know," he said slowly. "I think she'd be quite pleased if I didn't have a work-week job. Thinks it's beneath all dignity. Pointing out she's jeopardizing it might make her do it more."

"I'll see if I can think of an angle," he promised.

"Speaking of angles," Spike said, levering himself up to a sitting position as gracefully as any rusty zombie.

"Yes," Evan said, also frowning. "That was… interesting."

"It's on the same lines he's always talked about," Spike said, slow and judicious. "Making a terror we could be the answer to. But the stepping-up is… sudden."

"Was it bad, at the hospital?"

The expression leeched out of Spike's face. He didn't put on a new one before burying said face in Evan's neck again. Ev nodded a little, and rubbed his bony back for what seemed like hours.

Eventually Severus asked, muffled, "Ever seen a crushing wound?" Evan shook his head. "Frostbite?" Ev shook his head again. "Good."

Evan thought about giants. "I've seen splinching wounds," he mentioned.

"Bits ripped off is messier," Severus said grimly, following his thoughts without difficulty. "Harder to fix, too."

Evan smiled a little, also grimly. "You want to stay home all day and brush up on your healing spells, don't you."

"I'd be amenable to staying just here all year," Severus sighed into his throat. "But I'm more than ever committed to not having too much free time. Why now, do you think? Is something happening? Or coming up?"

"Lammas?" Evan offered. It didn't seem like a useful answer to him. "My parents want to know are we coming to theirs, by the way."

"I suppose it depends on whether Narcissa's planning a celebration," he said wearily.

"Might be a good excuse to only make a token appearance. We were good at Beltane, after all."

"That's a point, although I'm not sure getting glared at by your mum's much of an improvement to Bellatrix. Bellatrix can only kill me. Besides which, 'we' were not 'good.' _I_ was well-behaved; you were a sodden disgrace."

He was trying to joke, so Evan only thumped him lightly and corrected, "You did a sterling impression of an professional mourner and I was fun. What about him?" he asked, with Meaningful Emphasis. "Has he given any signs he was planning something?"

"You know I've only seen him once this week, not counting tonight."

"Once more than me, Spike. And he's not so stiff and snooty with you. Come on, anything notable?"

"No," said Severus in a drawn out tone that meant yes-oh-yes-oh-yes. Evan waited. "Just…" Evan waited some more. "He's seemed restless? And he's been having headaches."

Evan had to pause to let that sink in. "He's been having them so that you could tell," he asked carefully, "or he's told you he has them?"

"There's a reason I had to make more Raveled Brow potion."

"I keep telling you, you should call it Troubled Brow. Your average Diagon-trawler isn't going to know what that means, and it's Raveled Sleeve anyway."

"Sod 'em."

"Yes, all right," Evan rolled his eyes, smiling, and pressed his lips to Spike's temple. "You mean he's actually been asking you for potions?"

"He didn't _ask_ … and it's just a step up from willowbark," Severus said, trying to be dismissive and not doing very well.

"Sure it is. And he's drinking potions given to him which he did not watch being prepared." He waited to see if Spike would argue that their Lord was not so scrupulously cautious and aloof that this was unusual. It didn't happen. "When did this start?"

"The first time I know of was right after I started the Felix. You'd been to that that dinner party of Reggie's," Severus said, and then tightened his arm around Evan's neck, smiling into him. "You took a memory for your pensieve that night."

"That night deserved it," Evan noted, and tugged at Spike's thigh experimentally. They'd been rudely interrupted earlier, after all.

Spike turned out more than pleased to be snogged and snugged and manhandled, but in one of his moods where he wasn't interested in excitement anymore. Sometimes, Evan felt like telling his mum it wasn't all that different than living with a wife after all, although, to be fair, there were also moods where Severus had no patience for the soft and slow at all. He made a note to curse Fudge in the morning. Something very gentle, very subtle, that would fly him absolutely around the bend. Just like this.

Or at least to disconsolately tell Sue that he really, really wanted to, and why. Which would be almost as satisfying, and then he'd get sympathy. Sympathy from the potential-victim's spouse was not to be sneezed at. If he played his cards right, she might even help!

Still, Evan had no actual objection, apart from having hoped for more vigor. Certainly it was the sweetest death of an hour he could think of, all that coiled tension warmly unstrung all over him, a bony trowel of a nose idly trying to dig its way through his dressing gown if not actually inside his chest and throat, summoning their current book and trading off half-pages when drifting threatened to turn to dreaming. The only real trouble was that one could get just as lost in this sort of thing as in the other.

Case in point, they were so startled when Regulus finally came in that there was a certain amount of flailing elbow and knocking the couch over.

"I didn't think I ought to come this late," Reggie said mournfully when Spike had righted the furniture and glared his way to the bathroom for bruise balm. "Only Spike was so _definite_."

"Spike is always definite," Evan said. "You've got to be definite yourself to deal with him." Reggie drooped, and Evan mussed his hair. It sprang right back into place, of course. "No, you're welcome. We wanted you to come. Look, we made up drinks, just for you. I only mean you should trust your instincts more." He reconsidered. "But not around Bella. Then you should just go with it."

"That, I know," Reg said glumly, but then he glanced with interest at the table. "What do you mean, drinks just for me?"

"Let's try that again," Spike said, coming back with the pot of liniment, which he still insisted on calling Grenade Balm. "Evening, Reg."

"Hi, Spike. Sorry about startling—"

"Let us never speak of it again."

"Right," Reg agreed hastily. "What did you want me to come talk about?"

"I didn't," Spike said, lifting up Evan's (at this point scandalously wrinkled) shirt with no nonsense and applying the pungent purple paste to his back with the gentlest hands in the world.

"Oh warm," Evan melted.

"I'm confused," demanded Reg.

"I thought it might not be the best idea for you to go straight to bed after plotting…" Severus trailed off, and Evan knew he was thinking back to his day at the hospital. "I thought Bellatrix might have been unpleasant about having her nose rubbed in your working with me," he finished, instead.

"She's not jumping up and down clapping her hands in girlish delight," Reggie admitted. "It's getting harder to make her think I mind. Er… Spike?"

"Mm?"

"Why does that smell like pineapples and lavender?"

"Why do you think?"

"…Really?"

"That's not all there is to it, of course," Severus said. "Arnica, chamomile, salamander bile, powdered tiger's eye. But once I'd decided to use pineapple, I thought lavender would be preferable to eucalyptus, for the aromatic."

Evan hummed happily.

"Tiger's eye like the animal or the stone?"

"The stone."

"Oh." Reg seemed relieved. "They're endangered, you know."

"So conscientious," Spike noted in a hair-ruffling tone, amused. "It's the stone."

Reg nodded. "Did you say something about drinks?"

"I made one myself," Evan mumbled into the arm of the couch.

"…That was very nice of you," Reg said, with a marked drop in enthusiasm. Evan considered taking offense. Not for long, though. Spike was still rubbing balm into his back (or at least still rubbing his back), and he felt he was doing well not to drool.

He probably wasn't drooling.

"It's all right, I supervised," Severus said, comforting in his brisk way. "Anyway, I don't know if even Evan could ruin cocoa."

"Oh, yes he can," Reg said at once.

"I was _nine,_ " Ev protested thickly. He couldn't look indignant, though, because that would have required opening his eyes. He didn't need them to feel Spike perking with interest behind him.

"You didn't have a cold, Ev," Reg said patiently. "Your nose worked. The milk had gone off."

"I assumed any milk that was in the cold box was house-elf approved," Evan said with dignity.

"If it wasn't badly off," Spike suggested musingly, "it might have indeed been house-elf approved—as buttermilk. I'll show you a few things, sauces and salad dressings, maybe, next I shop. Even a cake if you're very good and stop forgetting the fucking silencing charms when they're your responsifuckingbility."

Evan admired the way his voice hadn't changed and his hands had gone on steadily, tenderly, without the least variance in their stroke, just as if Evan's back were a tetchy cauldron Severus had to be perfectly precise about stirring. He wondered whether he could exasperate Severus enough, without actually upsetting him, to be differently precise with him. It was a quite fine line, making it clear he was playing a game while actually playing the game well enough to make it count without saying so outright. If he explained things out loud, Spike definitely wouldn't be upset, but he'd be indulgent and humoring-Evan and sweet as well as loving, would hold back even more than he needed to in order to keep from scaring himself.

Which was always lovely, but it was always lovely: Ev could have _that_ anytime. He understood why Severus was most comfortable sticking with the trappings, and Evan didn't want the reality, either. Merlin, no. But he was sure his Spike would be magnificent, if Ev could coax him to play just a _little_ more seriously, just once in a while.

Maybe he could trade for trying that beard idea? …No, probably not. Not until he'd smoothed or smashed through Severus's Issues, any road.

"And then you burned it," Reggie persisted like a dogged traitor, although this might have been because even his voice suddenly was bright red. Evan didn't know what his problem was; Ev was face down, after all… oh; because Spike wasn't being subtle about what had happened with Fudge, right.

Well, it wasn't Reg's fault. Ev sniffed loftily. As well as he could with his face mashed into the sofa and Spike's hands reducing him to delicious, quivering jelly. "The book said it should be scalded. Scalded means burned. We have _three_ thesaurii—"

"Thesauruses," Severus corrected, voice smiling though his face probably wasn't.

"…No."

"Really it is, Ev, dreadful but true."

"Lies."

"I regret."

"LIES, and scalded means burned and you can look it mmmmm." It was a minor point. He had no objection to having his face tilted and kissed into submission. That was acceptable. So acceptable. Spike _should_ be rewarded for using sneaky Slytherin tactics and not trying to shout everything into submission all the time. Laudable, lovely, oh, and more rubbing again, too, long, strong fingers so warm and sure on his back…

"And he couldn't reach the sugar, so he substituted a fizzing whizbee. And when that wasn't sweet enough, he started stirring it with a lollipop," Reg told Severus, grinning.

"They're sweet," he mumbled into the cushion.

"Whizbees. Active ingredient billiwig stings," Severus said faintly, voice tremulous and hands pausing.

"Sherbets are sweet," Evan said loftily, stubborn. There had been nothing wrong with his logic, rot it. Just because Spike had probably known every interaction under the sun by the age of two… "Lollipops are sweet. Sweets are, by definition, sweet. Being made of sugar. Which was out of reach."

"Only, the lollipop was blood-flavored. And then, when it was too hot right off the stove, he added an ice mouse…"

Evan realized the hands on his back had gone away. "…Spike?"

He sat up, and scowled. Spike had collapsed back over the other arm of the couch, laughing so hard he wasn't getting any air to laugh with. He couldn't manage words, but his tapering fingers made an explosive gesture quite efficiently. Doubtless Evan would appreciate that this was gorgeous more when he resented it less, but that was what pensieves were for, so you could go back and paint things later without having to appreciate everything when you didn't actually want to.

"Boom," Reg confirmed, still grinning. "A very cold boom, and a very stripy ceiling. Linky said we were just lucky Sirius had a lolly in his pocket instead of a liquorice snap."

"Right," Evan said with more dignity yet, "neither of you is getting any of the hot buttered scotch."

"You didn't use goat butter, did you?" Reggie asked dubiously.

"No…?"

"Re'em? Alligator?"

Severus fell off the couch again. Evan seriously considered kicking him.

And, really, it wasn't as if Reg was a _guest…_

Turned out Reggie was still excellent at pillow fights, the oversized, sneaky little brat.

He was thoroughly muzzy before very long, not really because of the scotch. It was late, and he'd actually been worried about Spike all day, not just at the meeting. Flying North to get in all the Aurors' way evacuating people (and then getting himself arrested for snapping back when they told him off for it) would have been _just_ like the idiot. He'd told himself that no, Severus was working, and by the time news got to the hospital the first casualties would be there, too. Spike did the job that was in front of him.

Telling himself that over and over had kept him doing his own job (not nearly so exciting, thank Salazar), only a little more slowly than usual and without mucking up the canvas. Which was, in fact, important, because his subject was an intimate counselor of the head of the French MLE, and the Dark Lord was looking for allies. He'd painted beautifully, and chatted charmingly, and learned a lot. Mum and Dad and Grandpère were all going to be very pleased with him for it, each for their own reasons.

He was pleased himself; he knew more about how France worked now than he had after living there for months. And he'd been right, of course, because Spike did the job in front of him unless he thought it was too stupid to be worth doing.

But it had been a long, long day. He headed in for bed before Reg was even out the door (Reggie was family, after all, and _not_ a guest _),_ letting Severus see him out. It took longer than he expected. When Spike finally came back in from murmuring in their tiny foyer, he made a questioning noise.

"Impositions," Severus grumbled, the bloodhound light in his eye giving him away.

"He gave you a puzzle," Evan guessed.

"Mm." Spike hauled him up groaning by the collar and made him drink a shotglass of hangunder potion. Nasty stuff, but he got some mint water and a stringmint afterwards and then a stringy potions swot curled up under the covers on him, so that was all right. "There's a… there's something he wants me to analyze."

" _Reggie_ does?" he blinked. "What could he possibly—" he paused, and frowned. "Would this be the something that got Kreacher?"

"It would," Severus said grimly into his chest. "I'll be careful with it, believe me. In fact, it'll take some planning before I even try to collect a sample."

"Poor Kreacher," Ev sighed, tangling a hand into Spike's soft hair. It occurred to him that Regulus had just seen it _after Spike had washed it with potionless evening soap_ , true blue-black and silky and not oily-looking at all, and that he seemed to be annoyed about this. He was just starting to laugh at himself when he also realized that Spike had hesitated a half-beat before humming in agreement.

He frowned again and, curious, asked, "Are you lying to me?"

Spike lifted a quizzically amused brow at him. "What happened to 'it doesn't work if you do it out loud?' Would you have to ask if I were?"

He ignored the first question as patently silly, although arch was always a good look on his cobra. It was worlds and eons better than the stark determination not to be frazzled he'd been wearing so often lately. "Well, I didn't think so, but you have been getting better at things…"

"I'm withholding information," Severus told him, curling in with a wry little smile. "As it isn't mine."

It did take a second, but then Evan beamed, " _Oh!_ " He'd been worried about Reggie; his cousin had been attached to Kreacher even before Sirius had left the family, and afterwards he'd gotten completely dependant. And there was Linky, too. He wasn't completely sure the two elves were related (or how that worked for elves), but they certainly acted like identical twins under polyjuice. "Well," he said magnanimously, "I'm sure someone will tell me when I ought to know."

"Fatuous ass," Severus noted, biting his collarbone and sitting up with warm eyes. Summoning a book to his hand—not the sneaky-Greek epic they'd been reading, which Spike tended to read in the original once Ev started to get too sleepy to pay attention, which was nice—he motioned Evan to make a second headboard of himself for him, and started thumbing. "I know just the one for you…"

His deep voice was hypnotic enough even when it wasn't going on about sunless seas and caverns measureless to man. Evan was out like a candle well before the rather Freudian fountain imagery, which rather miffed him later for the two seconds before he realized it was an excellent excuse to demand _again, again_.

He woke up with the book on his arm and, for some inexplicable reason known only to one of their dreaming selves, part of Spike's hand in his mouth. Even after his evening shower this resembled neither the milk of Paradise nor breakfast, but Evan could work with it.

* * *

**Characters Interviewed!/OMAKE!**

**note** : Because this readers-interviewing-characters lark has been a minor hit, this section started to get so long it was interfering with the story.  The game continues but results are posted elsewhere.  You now get teasers at the bottoms of the chapters, and the whole thing can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2380514).

 

 **Hello Is Anyone There** : Evan, how many of Severus's habits have you picked up?  
E&S: (look at each other)  
S: That's a difficult question, as we've been living in the same room since we were eleven. It's hard to say, with a joined habit, who originated it, or whether everyone developed it together as a fad that outlasted its excitement. I think he picked up keeping his hair ties in a teacup from Avery—  
E: (appalled) Did I? I'll pick up a nice box tomorrow. Lacquer, I think, or colored wood, not enamel... yes, definitely something darker or softer-tone-matte would look better there.  
S: (amused with him, ignores) I probably started drinking coffee first, for the flavor, but he's so hopeless in the mornings it only took him long enough to work out he could turn it into hot liquid ice cream to start drinking it.  
E: I don't use _that_ much cream or sugar.  
S: Anymore.  
E: (makes a face at him) I suppose... it's normal to make sure you know who everyone in a room is when you walk in, but if you take up with Spike long enough you also start to pay attention to doors and windows and where you're sitting in relation to them, if only so he doesn't have to sit with his back to the room.  
S: Which I don't know how you can tolerate.  
E: Oh, I know I've got your wand over my shoulder. Besides, I don't actually have enemies. ^_^  
S: (nose-wrinkly scowl) You shouldn't _rely_ on that.  
E: And I have picked up his terrible illicit Muggle literature habit, although of course we don't admit to that.  
S: He also used to use both eyebrows when he eyebrowed people before third year.  
E: No, I didn't!  
S: Of course you didn't. And no one ever caught you practicing in the bathroom mirror, either.

 


	49. July, Week II: Ministry of Magic, (Under) London

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peter (who is not, goddammit, a cubicle drone) sort-of-eats-Severus's-sort-of-food again, this time on purpose. He does not understand how his life has gotten to this point, but his being sure he doesn't deserve it may not mean what you think.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** for implied het, discussions of fpreg and past fairly nasty violence with frostbite, Moody, base treachery most vile (or at least Pesto-Bismal pink), and SLYTHERIN!
> 
>  **Last-chapter notes** :  
> I don't want anyone to get the idea that Evan is (half) as beautiful as Gilderoy thinks Gilderoy is, or that Gildy is slavishly copying him. We're not in outright identity/success theft territory yet. He's a good-looking fella, but Gildy looks to him not because he's Adonis but because he's an only-slightly-older Noble House pureblood of Gildy's approximate physical type, with ~~artistic pretensions~~ a personal style that isn't too much effort to keep up.* Further, he ~~was a total manwhore~~ ** had a successful social life for as long as he wanted one and was desirable enough to get hit with a love potion by someone capable of pulling it off despite its being completely obvious (which it was. Heirs of families like THAT simply do not go all gooey over ugly, socially maladroit halfbloods from the sticks with no prospects, no matter how brainy. It just doesn't happen without magic on the order of amortentia and imperius. Their mothers make sure they don't even if they feel like it. Gilderoy has been on the wrong end of such maternal precautions, so he knows). Ergo Evan was doing something right. And Gildy, well, he doesn't generate his own ideas. Well. Not his own good ideas…
> 
> * Or, actually, any effort, once the shopping has been done. Severus takes more time getting dressed than Evan does (it's the buttons). Gilderoy has embellished. A lot. People who aren't Severus or Gilderoy's hairdresser/boyfriend/tailor probably haven't noticed. Actually, Gildy's boyfriend probably hasn't noticed, either.
> 
> ** Evan says it can't possibly be whorish if one's mother is (strongly) encouraging one to do it so one can narrow down the field of who one would be willing to marry. Severus says that just makes her one's pimp, but admits, on questioning, that he is unlikely to advance this view where Ev's mum can hear him. Or in fact any witch even remotely related to Narcissa.
> 
> That was a lot of note, but it's also the only Sev-an'-Ev you get this chapter. ;p

Peter unwrapped his sandwich with a sigh. He didn't exactly _like_ salted beef with marmite. No one in the world except Sirius liked salted beef with marmite, he was convinced, and Sirius only told himself he liked it because it was the anti-Black. It was just that he'd thought, that morning, that he'd want something for lunch that reminded him of home. Or, rather, the cozy times of feeling like the worst thing that was going to happen to him all day would be the race to find something else to aim bored and restless roommates at before they started picking on him.

Remembering the comparative safety of school was nice, sort of, but also thinking he wouldn't want to _enjoy_ his lunch much the day after yesterday's blood and stinking terror was an impulse he was now…

...Not regretting, actually. What he was regretting was picking pink, cold meat. At this rate, he thought, glumly picking it out and taking a bite of his now marmite-only sandwich, he was going to have to go vegetarian. Looking at red meat didn't make him quite as sick as the thought of poultry, but it wasn't at all appealing. At least no one had ruined fish and chips for him yet.

"Well, aren't you a sad sack," someone said cheerfully, and his sandwich went flying. The bits of it that didn't go down his lungs, anyway. "Eating bread and water in your itty bitty cubelette, what's the matter with you?" she went on as he choked and wheezed, whacking him hard on the back.

"What are you doing here?" he managed eventually. He even managed to make it look and sound a lot more pleased than the words implied, even through the coughing-up-of-marmite.

"Rescuing my fair prince from durance vile, apparently," she said, putting her hands on her round hips and giving him an eyebrow. "Do they _make_ you work through lunch?"

For some reason, he felt accused, and flushed. "Uh, well, no, I…"

"My droneykins is just that conscientious?" she cooed, still with the eyebrow.

"I'm not a _drone_ ," he protested. He hoped. He was working for Dumbledore, he'd gotten thirteen people out of danger yesterday, he'd been a _Marauder!_

But here he was today, he had to admit, eating lunch in his office because he worked for the Ministry and if he went to the cafeteria everyone would give him the stink-eye, like everyone did since the lake. He didn't think the Aurors who had come to him at the lake had told everyone, or anyone. They were professionals. It must just have changed him, permanently, turned him dark in a way that showed up in his magic. Permanently. He just had to resign himself to it: people were going to feel it, maybe forever. _Maybe_ not, a month wasn't really so long as curses and taints went, but…

Lucrezia was looking at him, whiskey-colored eyes through long, dark lashes, her amazingly shiny pink lips pursed. It was a bit distracting. They were so very pale and metallic, not natural at all, and it made them look so plump. It wasn't the kind of look Siri and James would have called sexy. What it was, he realized, was _sneaky_ , because it made him want to snog all the lipstick off and get to her real mouth until it looked soft again, and much darker than that.

"I heard it was all hands on deck yesterday," she said, tilting her head so that a cord stood out in her delicate throat, and added, somewhere between exasperation and a smile, "Gryff."

"Well, it was pretty bad, Lucy," he said lamely. "Giants resist magic; it takes a few people to handle one, and there were a lot of them."

"Mmm-hmm." She regarded him for a moment, and then shimmered forward a tiny step, like a snake. If he hadn't been sitting in his chair at his desk, he would have backed up. "What you need," she decided, tilting her head in the other direction so her chestnut waves washed across her shoulders, "is a pick-me up. Move," she directed, pointing at the desk.

He stared at her. Goggled, probably.

She raised both her eyebrows, a little dangerously. "Yes?"

"In real awake life," he said, a little faintly, "beautiful girls do not come unexpectedly into tubby blokes' offices and—"

This was apparently a right thing to say. Lucrezia had a really knock-you-on-your-arse smile, with only one dimple. She pointed again, with decision, and ordered, "On your desk, soldier." When he had scrambled fervently to do her bidding, she made herself spinnily comfortable in his chair, which he was _never going to think about the same way again,_ and planted her hands on his papers.

Where Pete's other girlfriends had said that his getting drowsy instead of going out like a light afterwards was one of the best things about him, Lucy got so energized that it could be an actual problem. Sometimes he worried it meant he wasn't satisfying her, and sometimes he worried she was an actual succubus. Mostly he just worried he might fall over while she was hauling him bouncily around. Of course, he was used to Sirius, so he was pretty good at not falling over no matter how not-awake he was.

"Where are we going?"

"We're eating outside," she told him firmly. "It's a very nice day. All lovely and warm."

"But my sandwich…!" He knew they hadn't taken it with them. He was rather afraid he might have sat on it.

She scoffed. "That's not _food_ ," and dragged him along to what wasn't actually a park, but was, literally, good enough for government work.

The Ministry had long since decided that, as in some political cycles they got the best and brightest and in some they got the people who weren't clever enough to invent careers for themselves, it was a bad assumption that everyone who worked for them was going to be good at apparition. They therefore liked to have the option of encouraging people to take their breaks in the building, and had set up an underground courtyard with the same enchantment on the ceiling as the one in Hogwarts' Great Hall.

That one got a lot of use in the Ministry, actually; if you couldn't turn it on in your office for at least a few hours a day, you knew you were being punished. St. Mungo's had explained to a Minister decades ago about the beneficial effects of sunshine and how much easier it was for people to work in pleasant (but not distracting) environments, and the Ministry liked to get the most out of its workers. If someone's work was done in an office, the office shouldn't make the worker mad to get out of it.

Peter sometimes wondered when sanity had left the building. It had clearly lived here once. There were lingering traces, like less-faded picture-frame-shaped patches in the wallpaper of an old house.

They settled under an old elm tree, and she pulled a sealed package out of a pocket of her robe. When she'd unshrunk and unpacked it, it turned out to be bowls and spoons and bread and butter and a canister of violently pink…

"What is it?" he asked, prodding it in fascination with the spoon. It was exactly the same color as her lipstick.

"Fruit soup!" she said, having some. "Try it, it's _so_ good in summer." Then she rolled her eyes, probably at his expression. "You know, technically gazpacho is also a cold fruit soup."

He poked it again. It was so very pink. "Is this some special high-tone pureblood recipe the rest of us wot not of?" he asked dubiously.

She paused, and suddenly looked guilty. "Nooo…." When he stared at her in dread, she said, or rather admitted, "I got it from a friend."

Fighting the urge to knock the bowl out of her hands and run back to his office for his emergency bezoar, he squeaked—er, demanded, "Lucy, did _Snape_ give this to you?!"

She sighed, aggrieved. "I _knew_ you'd take it like that. Just the recipe, Pete, _years_ ago. He wasn't anywhere near me when I made it, all right? I have it all the time when it's hot."

He looked between her and the bowl, wrestling with himself. "You made it? For me?" She didn't-exactly-glower at him in a clear yes. He braced himself and tried some.

Strawberries and cream and a hint of melon, a touch of mint that worked where it had no right to. More tangy and cool than sweet. Bugger.

"It's good," admitted Peter Pettigrew, traitor to all things Gryffindor and decent.

"Well, of _course_ it is!" Lucy sat back, satisfied. "I mean, all right, some of his Oops I Forgot To Eat While I Was Reading Through Dinner And I'm Too Paranoid To Sneak Down To The Kitchens And This Is What I've Got So What Can I Do With It experiments ought to have been registered as cleaning supplies, psychotropic potions, or lethal weapons, depending, but I wouldn't feed you one of _those_. What you do is you butter the soft bit of the bread and then you use the crust—"

"Good work yesterday, Pettigrew," someone said gruffly as a broad hand landed on Peter's shoulder.

He nearly spilled his soup, but then smiled gratefully up. "Oh, thanks, Moody." He hesitated, chewing on his lip. "Frank doing all right? He's not going to lose his arm, is he?"

"Nah," Moody grunted, "got to the hospital in plenty of time. Couple'a potions and some bandages with a warming charm; he'll be back at work in two days. Tomorrow, if he had his way, but someone's had a word with Alice."

Peter breathed out. He'd never seen anything like Frank's arm before, although he had again before the day was out. A frost giant had just picked the Auror up by it and flung him into a boulder. His arm and a big patch of his ribs on that side had looked frozen nearly solid to Pete. The worst part was that he'd stayed conscious the whole time Pete had been flying him to the nearest wizarding enclave, banging on doors, begging for floo access.

Everyone had gotten a lot more careful after one or two injuries like that and _worse_ , but the Aurors were going to be significantly short-staffed for a while. So were a lot of Quidditch teams. Beaters and Chasers had shown up in droves, once word had gone out on the wireless, to throw rocks and potions and even just distract giants from the Aurors with fancy flying.

Ministry grunts like Peter had actually taken very few casualties, though, which the Aurors and Hit Wizards probably would have resented if it wasn't because they'd all been running ambulance duty. Up until Bagnold's election this year Headquarters had run regular evacuation drills. Since Moody had been devising them for years and was a paranoid sadist, they hadn't translated too badly to open country with giants stomping around. Pete had already had good reflexes, of course. He might thank James for that, but he wouldn't thank Sirius out loud, or Snape at all.

"Alice the firecracker who's got a cousin named Roland?" Lucy asked.

Moody eyed her suspiciously. Because Moody eyed everyone suspiciously. In fact, when Moody eyed Peter suspiciously these days, it felt good, because Moody was treating him like he treated everyone else. "That's right, Miss. And you are?"

Lucy smiled, and put out a hand. "I'm Lucy, who's dating Peter and went out with Roland and Alice-and-Frank a few times at school."

"…Both of them?" Peter asked, his eyes peeling open, as Moody gingerly shook hands with Lucy, as though her hand might attack him, and only after peering carefully at it, first one dark eye narrowing and then the other. She wasn't wearing any rings that might have, Peter didn't know, been explosive or something. " _All_ of them?!"

She ignored him, asking Moody, "Isn't Alice about to pop?"

"Her baby's due soon, if that's what you mean," Peter said, bemused.

"Oooh," Lucy said, a little wide-eyed, distracted from looking at Moody like he was crazy. Which, yeah, he was, although it was a very useful and competent kind of crazy. "I just _bet_ Frank won't be back at work before she says, then. My friend Cissa went completely mental towards the end, and she's usually calm as _glaciers_."

Moody eyed her some more, and said, "…Right," and nodded at Peter, and wandered off.

"Of course," Lucy said, grinning wickedly at Peter, "I suppose getting rid of grizzled old wizards by talking baby-baking won't work for _you_."

"Both of them?" Peter repeated, and he had to admit it really was a squeak now. " _All_ of them?!"

"Well, not Roland together with Alice-and-Frank," she said, blinking at him. "That would have been icky; they're cousins."

Peter very rapidly considered his options. He had the advantage here, he realized, of years and _years_ of watching James and Sirius court and flirt and pull. All he had to do, if he wanted to keep seeing this gorgeous witch (his own size!) who came by like every office fantasy ever to interrupt a grimly tedious day after a grimly horrifying one and then dragged him out for a picnic, was the exact opposite of anything that would ever occur to either of them.

"Okay," he said therefore, equably, and had some more soup.

Lucrezia smiled at him. A different kind of smile, sharp and slow and (it was the only word for it) Slytherin. The hair on the back of his neck stood straight up.

But she said, simply, "Pass." Holding his eyes like a baby bird's, she sprinkled a white powder onto the bread and held it out to him.

She didn't know, couldn't, how lurchingly, sickeningly terrified he was to reach out and tear off a hunk of bread and eat it. It wasn't just that the powder could have been anything, it was so much worse than that. But that was bad enough.

The bread, as it turned out, was just bread. The white stuff was just salt.

It was, humiliatingly enough, Peter's immediate superior who kicked them out of the courtyard for snogging indecently in public, but somehow Pete couldn't manage to feel less than euphoric. Even when all his friends _including Remus_ (!) _and Frank_ (! ! ! !) ragged the hell out of him for the 'Life-Affirming PDA With Some Bird,' he couldn't so much as manage to be embarrassed at how goofy he knew his grin had to look.

* * *

* * *

**Q &A Teasers!  
**

**HATI** : Did the sorting hat give you a choice of houses too?

Albus: (twinkle) I believe my faculty have discussed this at some length as a result of someone else's question.* Lemon square, my dear? They've got shortbread on the bottom, they're very good.

_* which can be found[here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2380514/chapters/5259161).  I admit to being evil. :D_

 

 **HATI** : Who chooses the prefects and head boy/girl? Do you or do their heads of houses?

Dumbledore: The Head Boy and Girl are joint decisions agreed on by the senior faculty, myself included.  As to the prefects, I suppose the Heads of House would give some weight to an opinion I expressed, but I don't interfere in the way my Heads run their Houses. If I hadn't trusted them with the children's care, I wouldn't have given it to them.  
Severus: He expresses opinions ALL THE TIME. And weight certainly is given to them. To give him his due, I don't think he intends to interfere with the decision-making. Usually.  
Minerva: No, of course he doesn't. It's natural that he should notice when certain students are doing well.  
Severus: It's not natural at all, given he hardly talks to any of them except when w—they're in trouble. Someday they're going to figure out all the ways he spies and there's going to be a massive bonfire and then everyone whose ancestors had a portrait burned is going to oh god.  
Minerva: Have a cup of tea and cease to be ridiculous this instant or I shall go over the last Gryffindor/Hufflepuff game point by point very loudly.  
Severus: (horror, obedience, tea)


	50. Back Room, Whizz Hard Books, Diagon Alley / Nelson, Lancashire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Four years later, Lily (who needs to remember she isn't telepathic) still remembers Sev's poetry word for word. No, not _that_ kind of poetry, but everyone is disturbed anyway. Meanwhile, Remus has a contractual obligation to desecrate holy ground. It's in his lease. No, srsly. It's _in his lease_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : More Gryffindors, sorry 'bout that. Lots of sneaky manipulation and plot-forwarding next time, I promise.
> 
>  **Q &A**: I'm not 100% sure anyone asked any questions about daily life per se. That's ok, you'll get Severus's opinion on Weetabix later (I have no idea what Weetabix tastes like, but Severus definitely has an opinion).
> 
> Let's try this, then: Ask a character a ridiculous internet-quiz type question!  
> (Not ones about other fandoms, please; I would probably waste writing time on the research if I allowed that.)
> 
> And do keep in mind that while characters will answer meta-truthfully if at all, they will reply in character. So giving Severus a sex-related quiz might be amusing but is not likely to be informative. And along those lines... sorry 'bout that, LittleBabyDamien... n,n;;;

"You," Remus said reproachfully, folding his arms, "should not be here."

Lily stuck out her tongue at him and closed the door, bells jangling cheerfully behind her.

"I mean it!" Remus insisted, pulling up the stepstool people used for the high shelves and transfiguring it into something resembling a comfortable chair for her. "You're, what, three weeks to due?"

"Maaaaaybe," she said innocently, doing a reasonable approximation of the torso-waggle she did when she was faking innocent ignorance like a fake thing and wasn't gravid.

"And there's all _dust._ What if you sneezed and the baby just," he waved his hands frantically, "popped out or something?"

"It really doesn't work like that, Rey," she said, looking at him like he was the only person she knew who ought to have known better and was grievously disappointing her. Since she didn't bother to sit down, either the basket on her arm wasn't to be shared with him or, more likely, he was about to be cheerfully kidnapped. "Though if it did, it might save some trouble. How bad a time is this? Is this volunteer work?"

He appreciated her asking it that way. It sounded better to say 'yes, volunteer,' than 'no, not paid.' "No," he said cheerfully, "not a library. They have to actually pay their shelving serfs, even for pick-up shifts." That was one thing about a company like Whizz Hard Publications; they might have only thought they had a sense of humor, but it meant they wanted to think they were good people and salt of the earth and all. So they did try to act like it. Not bad people to work for, even if he couldn't get them to hire him in any steady sort of way. "Since you timed your visit for lunch, though…" It would be an early lunch, but he wasn't complaining.

"But I'm not eating here, it's all dusty," she said firmly. "Step smartly, it's on Jamie."

"That has less force in the taking advantage-of-him department now that you're married to him," he pointed out. If he passed up the chance to bring home leftovers, though, Sirius would accuse him of Exercising Uselessly Selfish Morality At The Expense Of The Firm. Remus knew this because he'd done it before. And it was an accusation that was so weird that there was just no answer to it. So he meekly wrote an on-break note and joined Lily at the door.

They didn't go to any of the places she'd dragged him to before. Instead, she took his arm without leaving the shop and apparated them to a deserted and rather dirty playground, the chains on the swings all rusted and creaking. In the distance, a few massive chimneys belched smoked, and more didn't. Remus could feel every single witty, incredulous comment Sirius would have wanted to make pushing up under his tongue. He just looked at Lily inquiringly.

She was looking around sadly. "I always wanted to clean this place up," she murmured. "You don't think people would ask too many questions, do you?"

He thought about it. "They wouldn't get answers," he said finally. "If we _just_ cleaned, it wouldn't be obvious that the ninja Samaritans had had magic, would it? And that rust's got to be a tetanus hazard."

She looked at him gratefully. It was only a moment's work, and another for her to pull out and unshrink a picnic basket and cushion, set them up on the forlorn bench under the parched tree.

"You didn't grow up here?" he asked dubiously. It just seemed so unlikely.

"No-oo," she drew out. "We spent our summers nearby, though."

Summers. Remus had heard all about Lily's summers. Not even just from Lily, or from James at the top of his lungs. There had been those few cold, warming months early in '76, when he and Snape had been cautiously spiraling in around each other, before Sirius had sent it all to hell.

Should he comment? He wanted to, wanted to ask, _Lily, you know you can't clean_ him _up, right? Is there some reason you suddenly want to again?_

But she was avoiding his eyes, rubbing a fallen hornbeam leaf between her fingers. Okay, then, she knew he wanted to say it. Best not to, then. At least for now.

He silently helped her unpack the basket, went through the ritual of Examining The Finger Sandwiches And Speculating On Their Dubious Contents. It was a commercial basket, not one she'd made herself, so even though it was a _good_ commercial basket this was good for a few minutes' tension relief, without even making her bristle about her cooking skills.

The fact that it _was_ a commercial hamper made him wonder how much of an impulse gathering him up for this little picnic had been. Not much of one at all, he suspected, looking at her face, although it might have looked that way to someone who didn't know her. A decision she'd wrestled with for a while, rather, and had come to a very sudden conclusion on. As she did. If it had been a real impulse she would have spent time on it, and showed up all harried and proud around twelve-thirty or one.

Eventually, though, when she'd gone through three sausage rolls without saying a word, he decided she needed a kick. Not just because he wanted a chance at the rolls before they disappeared, either.

"So," he asked, careful to sound idle, "s'there something you particularly wanted to talk about?" That would have been a mistake with almost anybody else under the sun, but Lily and Subtle had never been even nodding acquaintances.

It was about the only thing that had kept Remus from sitting James down and talking to him about her in private, some days. She'd been fully capable of telling him to sod off when she'd wanted to, and Remus had always had a sneaking suspicion that she was about the only person in the _world_ who was even _capable_ of developing an appreciation for Jaime's over-the-top heart-on-his-sleeve style (although he didn't have that many close girl friends and apparently it was normal to be baffled when anyone was attracted to a brother, so he could be wrong about how strange her tastes were). Normal people would have assumed he was being sarcastic.

Especially as Prongs was actually quite good at sarcasm. Or at least at being drawlingly cruel in a way that resembled sarcasm if you didn't examine it too closely and realize he meant every word.

Lily thought he was silly and embarrassing, but the idea that he didn't _mean_ it had never occurred to her. Well, not once she'd started to care whether he meant it or not. Before that she'd been fairly well convinced he hadn't, and fairly well disgusted about it.

"Yes," she said, in an admitting-it tone, "but I'm not supposed to tell you."

He blinked at her, and then started laughing, and informed her, "I love you, Lils."

She threw a gherkin at him with a scowl. Padfoot would probably have caught it neatly in even his human mouth. And then leered suggestively and bounced his eyebrows like a double-sized Groucho Marx. Remus did catch it in his mouth, but only after it had bounced off his nose.

When he'd wiped his face off, he said, "Go on, then. Tell me what you feel you can tell me. Or talk around it. Or," he waved a hand, "so on."

Being Lily, Lily took a good couple of minutes to try and work out how to do that. Remus ate an orange and very civilly did not spell _circumlocution_ for her. Eventually, she said, "I was telling Professor Dumbledore something very important when the attack happened, and he'd just told me to sit on it until he decided what to do, but now it's been a while and it might be time-sensitive but he's probably _really busy…_ "

"Is there an oxygen tank in here?" Remus wondered, peeking into the hamper.

"What?"

"Breathe," he suggested, and raised his eyebrows at her.

She didn't throw another pickle, which was moderately alarming. Instead, she aarghed, "I just don't know what to do. I mean, he's probably _really busy._ The British mugwumps have been overseeing the cleanup in the Orkneys and working with the Aurors to reinforce the border wards, and the Wizengamot already holds the Assizes during the holidays so he won't be called away for trials while classes are in session, there's a real buildup over the summer, Moody says. And he must have things to do at the school…"

"Lily," Remus said practically. "How old is Dumbledore?"

She frowned, and went into her purse. After a bit of rooting, she came out with her Albus Dumbledore Chocolate Frog card. The picture on it looked at her in gentle inquiry, but drifted off to the side when she just smiled and shook her head. They were only supposed to use the cards to contact Dumbledore in an emergency. Looking at the back, she said, "It doesn't say. I don't know."

"Probably over seventeen, though, I expect?" he suggested.

She eyed him, eyes rather brighter than the parched leaves overhead. "If not, he's a real magician with spirit gum and a fake beard."

"He can probably decide for himself how busy he is, then, don't you think?"

"Well, that's what I _was_ thinking," she said earnestly, stealing a wedge of his orange. "Since I haven't heard back from him, doesn't that probably mean—"

" _Lily._ " He shoved his eyes into his hands, and then yelped and scrambled to flush the orange juice sting away. Not that he didn't get worse on a calendar-regular basis, but that he was expecting. "Yow!"

"Baby," she noted, smiling, and handed him a wet handkerchief.

"Thanks," he said, wiping his eyes, and then gave her a very serious tired look. "But _stop._ "

"Stop what?"

" _You know what,_ " he said direly. "You're _doing it again_."

"…I'm not trying to _read his mind,_ " she protested, shifting uncomfortably with her arms wrapped around her belly, keeping her balance on the narrow bench. "I just thought, since—"

"You 'just thought, since,' when you thought Jamie and Marlene were seeing each other behind your back in seventh year, too," he reminded her.

"Be fair, Marlene was trying to _make_ me think—"

"And you fell for it. But they were actually?" he prompted.

She sighed, and grumbled, "Planning my surprise party…"

"And when you thought you were going to catch Padfoot's cousin selling the answer sheet to McGonagall's midterms?"

"It was still mean," she insisted.

"Maybe," he allowed, "but a poetry reading isn't actually against the rules." And it hadn't actually been all that mean, as roasts of authority figures went. Particularly roasts by Slytherin girls who could get away with just about anything. No criminal or even really slanderous allegations, and the musing over who on the faculty or in the Ministry its subject had been pulling had alternated between delicate and playful. Said subject had reputedly been rather tickled by it (although the Tartan had nearly blown a blood vessel or three).

Remus believed that, although not that the Old Man had given Slytherin points for it or had the parchment framed and put up in his office. Narcissa had probably calculated how nasty she could be without getting into trouble down to the syllable, if you could believe what Padfoot said about her. What Remus had wondered was how much of it she'd written on her own (one word? Two?) and whether she knew that the poem 'she'd' satirized was muggle. Probably not, since Snape was still alive.

"And I'd bet you _anything_ she didn't write it herself," Lily went on darkly, in harmony with his thoughts but evidently still rankled. "'What shaggy tassels fray about thy limbs,' _ha._ Don't tell _me_ that's not Sev _all over_."

"…Er?" Remus frowned. He started to rub a fold of his trouser-leg between his fingers nervously, and stopped.

"'What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape,'" she stormed on. "Was the original line. He got both Ls, the SH, the S, an AY sound, _and_ the FR in. _And_ suggested hairy legs.   _And_ split ends! The whole thing was like that. _Ode on a Sequined Robe_ by Narcissa Black, my _eye._ "

Remus paused. Stepped discretely over the tangle of lurking obsessions. "I mean," he said carefully, "since when is Snape 'Sev' again?"

She went still, surprised, as if she hadn't really heard herself.

"Lily, why are we _here?_ "

She curved a little over her stomach, wrapping her arms around its great curve again. "He'd know what to do, and I can't exactly go ask him," she said miserably, staring at the ground, and Remus breathed again. "Or Tuney. She wouldn't even _want_ to see me. I told you she had her baby, didn't I?" He nodded. She didn't sigh, exactly, but her breath out was very unhappy. "I could talk to Mum and Dad, but they'd want me to explain everything. Even if Dumbledore hadn't told me to sit on it, if they knew how things were getting they'd be worried…"

"Well, I know what to do," Remus said firmly. One always did, when it was someone else's problem. "Owl him and say there must be a lot of demands on his time since the attack, so is there anything you can do on your own until he can spare a moment."

She looked at him, pained. "Rey, that's so… passive-aggressive."

He blinked. "I thought it was polite."

"Well, yes _,_ " she allowed, her voice adding, _BUT._

"Well, what would Snape tell you to do, then?" he asked, a bit peeved.

"Not bother about him and work on it myself," she said promptly. "Or go bang on his door and say, 'HELLO, this is important, TOO, let me kindly assume you've just forgotten and exact punishment by educating you at length about all the thirty-odd potions against age-related memory deterioration I can think of off the top of my head.'" She paused. "Well, I don't know if he'd tell me to say that, exactly, but it's about what he'd say. —What?"

"What?"

"You look really disturbed."

"I am really disturbed," he admitted. "If you'd stopped before the sarcasm, those would have sounded exactly like what Sirius would tell you."

"…Thank you," she glowered, "now I'm really disturbed, too."

"What will you do, then?"

"See if Mum still has Tuney's old copy of _Debrett's Guide to Correspondence_ ," she grumbled. "He's older than dirt, he should appreciate that."

"O…kay," said Remus in a backing away slowly voice. He could, actually, work out what that was from context, and assumed also that it was Muggle, and really did not want further details.

He took another sandwich, and looked at his watch while he ate it. There was plenty of time before he had to get back, so he asked, "Lily, I _am_ right in thinking that you and Snape used to spend a lot of time here when you were kids?"

"…Some," she said warily. "Why are you using Apologetic Voice #5?"

"…You have my apologetic voices numbered?" he asked, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

"No, Rosier and Ben did them," she said. "Instead of listening to the other years' prefects' reports. It wasn't just you, either. They had about thirty of Lovegood's Not Seeing What's In Front Of Him faces. Number Five for you was Probably Actually Sort Of Regretful But Definitely Stubborn."

"All right, fair cop," he agreed, not surprised that Evan Rosier, their year's male Slytherin prefect, hadn't been paying attention in meetings or that Ben Goldstein, the Ravenclaw one, had defaulted to making lists when he was bored. They must have started that in sixth year, after James had taken over for him, though. They would have included him at least occasionally if it had been a thing before Sirius had blown everyone's lives up, and for the rest of that year Rosier hadn't been relaxed and fooling around in prefect meetings.

Oh, he'd sprawled all over his chair looking, to the casual eye, half-asleep, very nearly as usual. On closer examination, though, his eyes and Narcissa Black's had both been cool and hard, barely ever lifting off Remus and Lily. They hadn't looked like they knew, not exactly _knew_. Still, they'd made Remus very nervous, waiting for the thumbscrews and hot pokers to come out.

"It's just," he went on, "if Snape would consider this holy ground—"

" _Holy ground?"_ she scoffed. "We played here sometimes as kids."

"—Then I have a contractual obligation to desecrate it and send him pictures," he finished, apologetically again, and added, "Sorry."

She shot him are-you-mental eyebrows, and asked, "What do you mean, a contractual obligation?" in a voice to match.

"It's in my lease," he apologized.

Lily stared. "In your _lease,_ " she repeated flatly.

He shrugged lamely. "Well, I'm subletting from Padfoot, technically, and he's really being extremely reasonable about the rent, and… you know those contracts he does, where you'd swear they were a joke and he was just playing around when he wrote them, but then if you agreed in the first place you're stuck because he actually never stops thinking they're funny, and you always _do_ agree because he gets so caught up in it you get caught up too and forget that jokes aren't a joke to him?"

"…Oh, god."

"Look, I didn't ever expect to be in a position to _meet_ any of his stupid conditions. But here we are."

She went on staring. Flatly. _You know, Remus,_ her eyes said, _I do NOT always agree, I NEVER agree, because rolling over for the excited-puppy eyes is not mandatory, so STOP._

Instead of answering directly, he kept up the meekish-but-firm tone and said, "I'm thinking psychedelic art… and I do have to get back, so probably something simple. Apparently-spray-paint, I guess. What do you think, tie-dye? Fractals? Flowers and peace signs? Nothing that'll upset the local parents too much, obviously."

"I don't know you," Lily said, shaking her head, and apparated away. She couldn't have completely stopped him now that he'd been here, and she knew it, could only have delayed him for the moment. Her lack of trying didn't mean it wasn't a real rebuke: she'd taken the hamper with her.

He didn't have a choice, though, not really. Sirius knew when he felt guilty, and would know if he was telling the truth about what he felt guilty about, and the idiotic thing was _actually in his bloody lease._

* * *

* * *

**Q &A Teasers!!**

**LittleBabyDamien** : I want to ask the same questions of several of our characters, each one relating to Muggle culture in a specific decade. Tom, focus on the fifties, Severus, on the sixties, and Peter, on the seventies. One: what music typifies the era for you? Any specific songs that stand out to you? Two: What car would you drive, if you had no limitations or restrictions? Three: what major news event, political for preference, stands out from that era? Or, if you prefer, what was the first international event that you remember, regardless of decade?

Tom (1950s):  
1\. (loathing) Christmas music. Sometimes one couldn't get it out of one's head in _June._ And that loathsome treacly crooner Sinatra. I think he took lessons from Binns; I'd swear his every song went on quite as long as one of those lectures.  
2\. CRUCIO! As if Lord Voldemort would stoop to filthy Muggle transportation!  
3\. Whether you call it World War II or the climax of the long Grindelwald War, the first international event I remember is almost certainly the same one everyone my age does. The Blitz made quite an impression, particularly on London in my third and fourth years at Hogwarts. _So_ thoughtful of the school to insist on sending us 'home' every summer, when children with parents were being sent to the countryside in droves, and to carefully check in the years afterwards to ensure there was a shelter and full table to return in summer _to_.

_Sorry about that. Did not intend cursing the readers to be a possibility, but that was his response..._

 

 **Louise** : I just read the notes, and I'm confused - did I miss a major plot point? Who has given whom a love potion? (Lips pursed and eyes preemptively brimming over with disillusioned tears.)

E: (rolls eyes) No one has given anyone a love potion, for Merlin's sake.

S: (brightly) Although I wouldn't put it past Narcissa to have slipped us both one to make sure we didn't break up her support system attaching ourselves to Other People.

E: (glares) You. Would. Have. Noticed.

S: (grinning) Maybe I didn't dare cross her.

E: _Not! Funny!_ Since when do you think love potions are less than monstrous?!

S: Since never. But the idea that they can be blamed or credited for relationships that a pensieve would prove to have built up naturally over time based on pre-existing liking and trust proven justified is beyond laughable. They provide affectionate obsession and/or lust, with mooning and/or stalking. The signs of a potion-induced relationship are very obvious and do not include you thumping me all the time as if we were still adolescents in the Slytherin dorms, or the affected party being able to hold down a job if continually dosed over time, or anybody insulting anybody on a regular basis or blithely ignoring anyone's strongly-felt opinions and expressed desires in important matters like rent. Tyrannosaurus Musclehead.

E: (g) You _lost_ , Spike, get over it.

S: (makes face) Lockhart just assumes what many people probably do assume because he, like them but more so, is an idiot, and may never have been in contact with reality or human-person emotion in his life. Furthermore, I strongly suspect he's not above using them himself and may even have had them used on him, and he's certainly been slapped down by enough mothers to be baffled by the fact that yours tolerates me. He cannot understand it as a natural happenstance and therefore assumes dark magic.

E: I don't actually understand that, either. Not that I'm complaining. Did you just admit you like and trust me? Out loud? In public? :D

S: (sniff) I said no such thing. No nouns or pronouns were used. Obviously I meant you.

E: I _know_ you did! :D

S: (glare) You know what I mean.

E: Yes, I do. :D

S: ...(sigh) Yes, I suppose you do.

E: ^_^

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Albus may be Supreme High Banana of the This-That, the Whatnot, and the Whoozit, but that doesn't mean he gets taken seriously. There is a reason for that. Filius will explain, using words of a length suitable for Gryffindors. Of course, intelligent does not mean immune to shameless manipulation...


	51. The Owlery, Hogwarts, Just After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Albus may be Supreme High Banana of the This-That, the Whatnot, and the Whoozit, but that doesn't mean he gets taken seriously. There is a reason for that. Filius will explain, using words of a length suitable for Gryffindors. Of course, intelligent doesn't mean immune to shameless manipulation...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings** : Long. Enough politics to choke a python, Red 40, empty calories, shameless manipulation. IE: it's an Albus chapter. ;)
> 
>  **Q &A/notes**: Please send more questions that are utterly ridiculous, I'm enjoying these so much. ^.^
> 
> Am also in a bit of a staring-at-a-block at the moment. Questions for/about the Marauders & Lily & Order might help, the block is centered around them. Suggestions re questions are (probably obviously) just to get you rolling, though. Plaaaaay withhh meeee...

_Be assured, the matter is never far from my mind, my dear,_ Albus wrote, _but is more delicate than you suppose. If no discreet protection can be arranged in the next few days, I will arrange some less discreet. Until then, stand fast, be patient, and mention Madam Pomfrey to James now and then, as someone you trust and, if you can say so honestly, miss._

Without looking up as he attached the note to the school owl's leg, he requested, "Stop reading over my shoulder, will you?"

"Under," Filius corrected cheerfully, hopping up to sit on the table. "I thought it was your daily Howler to the Confederation."

"It would have come to you before long," Albus pointed out, not contesting the description. He hadn't been writing _quite_ daily circulars to the International Confederation of Wizards since the attack on the Orkneys, and they had all certainly been entirely polite.

It was true, however, that the collective shrug of his fellow Chief Mugwumps had left him just a touch irked. Yes, there had only been one major incident so far, but ought not unanimously electing him Supreme (admittedly only a grand way of saying first among equals) to have indicated some trust in his judgment? He _knew_ Tom.

"I thought I'd save the owl a piddling little trip to the Great Hall so short it might not have stretched her wings at all," Filius lied without even an effort at credibility, scratching the owl at the join of her beak. "We're to be spared one today, then?"

"It does begin to seem a trifle pointless," he admitted. "Although I can't think why. I realize they may not like to authorize two watch-hubs for terrorist organizations in the Empire, but Ireland has an entirely separate ministry, you know."

"I do know," Filius agreed, amused. A little too amused, possibly. Even quizzical. He looked rather as though Albus were missing something.

Albus eyed him, but went on, "And we're considerably less stretched now that things have settled down in South and Southeast Asia."

"Don't forget, though, more than half the witches and wizards who had anything to do with the Vietnam War or the Wizarding side of the India emergency and the Ugandan war have resigned," Filius cautioned. "And we were counting on the Colonies—er, the States, that is, for new blood."

"They were so enthusiastic," Albus agreed sadly.

" _And_ the Middle East is, if I may say so—"

"Please don't say heating up," he begged hastily. His friend looked disappointed, so clearly Albus had gotten that in just in time.

Filius shrugged the loss of awful-pun opportunity away and went on gamely. "Well, the Kohenim, Bakarahimams, and Hakaiin—"

"Even most of them just say 'the Israeli, Arabic, and Egyptian wizards, you know," Albus mentioned, smiling at his Head of Ravenclaw.

"Some of them are witches," Filius said primly, "and they all have approximately no confidence in the Camp David accord lasting past the next holiday that gives anyone an excuse to wander drunk over the border, wizard or muggle…"

Albus brightened. "Ah, well, we've already had Passover this year, I believe."

"Yes, _we_ have. I don't know why you keep ducking my Seders; there are lots of sticky sweet things, especially the wine, and I only let Binns preside _one time.._."

"Was it only once?" Albus asked in a hollow voice. "I thought it went on for years…"

Filius sighed up at him. "An error never repeated, I assure you. Besides, he's a ghost now; it would be tactless to invite him to dinner. Come next year, you'll see. You always have fun when Minerva gets tipsy, don't you?"

Albus had to allow that he did. There were so many things to bet on.

"Now, as I was saying, the Soviets—"

"Oh, that's just their Muggles," Albus said dismissively. "Tsarasputina Valentina assures me their wizards have more sense than to…" he coughed.

Filius managed to look sympathetic instead of sadistic, and probably very nearly meant it. "Get involved in a sand war in Asia? Dive headfirst into a quicksand quagmire as welcoming as Siberia in winter?" Which was a comparison he had the right to make.

"I was extremely young," Albus said with dignity, not mentioning how badly he had wanted a distraction from his shattered family and other matters, or how deeply unimpressed Aberforth had been by what a ( _really extremely)_ young Al had thought for sure would be seen as the noble penance he'd intended, "and it was excellent healer's training, and a far more straightforward matter than what Pavlovsky is letting his muggles in for. There was really no need for her to take such a personal tone. And besides," he added loftily, "we won."

Filius looked wry, and swung his boot-heels under the table. "Sometimes I manage to forget that the Supreme Mugwump was a Gryffindor," he noted. "And then you say something like that, and I have nightmares for months. I'm just about resigned to it in the head of the Wizengamot and even to the potential conflict of interest, since you've been handling it well enough so far. But the head of the Confederation—or even if you were just head of MI-20—has no business having been trained up in the school of guts and glory."

"Chin up," Albus advised, matching his wryness again. "No one's paying me the least mind."

"When it comes to your home-grown pet peeve, no. And you really don't know why?"

His friend was looking amused again, but Albus supposed he really couldn't avoid it. There was no actual harm in Filius one didn't throw at him first; quite the reverse. "I fear not," he admitted.

Filius tilted his greying head to look at Albus, shrewd eyes crinkling. "Well, Chief," he said (being punctilious about using the correct title for the conversation they were having both when the situation was a formal one and when he was pulling Albus's leg), "if anyone asks you, either you didn't hear this from me or you heard it at considerable length and in a reasonably admonishing tone. Hm. Long suffering? No, no… 'you've had this coming and now you've got it,' sort of thing. I'll leave the question of pointing and laughing to your discretion."

"Oh, dear," Albus said mildly, blinking, and started digging around in his sleeves. "Ought I to be glad we don't do performance reviews?" He offered one of his finds to Filius.

Who blinked, derailed. "…Er… are you threatening to break my legs? Because… this is too small by far even for me to walk with, and Poppy could fix them in about a second and a half even if I couldn't do it myself and frankly it's rather garish, Albus."

"No, no, you don't walk with it, you eat it," Albus explained, sticking the second one in his mouth. "Or hang it on a tree. I've had them banging around since Christmas."

"…It's July."

He waved a hand. "They're minty. I don't know about you, but I don't want mints in winter. This was beginning to sound like the sort of conversation whose taste one might want to wash away afterwards."

"Or during, I see."

"I have more," Albus assured him contentedly, sucking.

"We'll be putting how many candles on your cake in August, six?" Filius smiled.

"Ah, flattery! How wily of you, softening the blow. Shall I tell Horace you're spelling for his job?"

"Dear Merlin, no," Filius shuddered. "All that standing bent over a worktable chopping and peeling and getting his ankles toasted, as if grading wasn't bad enough. I suppose it's cooler down there, but still, I don't know how he stands it."

"By offering a great many opportunities to make up extra credit by practicing ingredient preparation, I believe," Albus said, "although I gather the program has suffered in recent years. And, of course, heat-dispelling stockings."

"Shocking," Filius drawled. Albus looked a question at him, but he just said, cynically, "It's not mine to comment on how Horace runs his House, I'm sure. And in any case, I won't tell you what I meant about the other thing if you don't like me to, but you won't _distract_ me out of it. Wily indeed," he added, sliding Albus an amused look.

"No, no," Albus sighed, leaning up against the owlery's window and letting the breeze play with his hair. His beard, of course, was neatly tied in front of him, although a few stray strands did flutter a bit below the cord. He didn't miss being a redhead scarcely at all anymore. Now that his hair had settled into _pure_ white it was at least as striking as it had been in his youth, and far more dignified, and didn't clash with everything. Still, he had been vain of it when he was very young; it was the salt-and-gingery in-between stage that had been dreary. "Hex on."

"Well," Filius said, rather more gently than he'd menaced he would, "you might get rather farther with the other national mugwumps-in-chief, you know, if you were to make some reference to the several decades it took you to pull your head out of," he hesitated, and delicately went on, "the sand the last time the Confederation was considering turning its attention to an alleged terrorist you'd met before he allegedly went Dark."

Albus looked at him, wounded (on several levels). "Filius," he chastened, "you're surely not suggesting that our colleagues would be so petty as to ignore a pressing threat simply because they're still annoyed with me for being reluctant to dive into what anyone could have seen was a conflict of interest over fifty years ago."

"I'm surely not," Filius agreed dryly, and then reconsidered. "Largely. I wouldn't answer for Dhang. Or Mbenga, or Jackson. But quite a few of them think you've been burned once and now you're twice shy and shying at shadows, and the majority think your instincts are farsighted."

"Oh, dear," Albus said, after a moment.

"Mm," Filius agreed, casting a charm to see what the candy cane was made of. "Albus, what on _earth_ is this?" he asked in dismay, pointing to the image of a molecule superimposed over an ear of corn.

"It looks like some sort of grain-derived sugar to me," he said vaguely, because it was floating between the images of a menthol and a sucrose-over-sugarcane molecule and to his alchemy-trained eye it quite resembled the latter and he really didn't care. "I suppose I shall need hard evidence, then."

"It would help. So would an iota of diplomacy, of course. I really don't think you should eat that."

"Nonsense, it's extremely tasty. Now—"

"But what about _that_ one?!" Filius asked in alarm as a much more complex image formed.

"Good heavens, Filius, I don't know," Albus sighed, rubbing the crooked places where his nose hadn't healed straight. "But it appears to be water-soluble. It's probably the dye. Now—"

"Paracelsus preserve us, they _dye_ their food?! As if it were _clothing?_ Albus, I wish you'd stick to Honeydukes…"

Albus gave up. He wasn't, on reflection, sure it would be altogether wise to discuss the matter further with Filius anyway.

He could take Filius's advice at once and send yet another message out, this one acknowledging the problem his colleague had just brought to his attention. To sound more reasonable on the subject without giving them a more _solid_ reason to be convinced, though, brought the risk of being seen as the Wizard Who Cried Werewolf down on him. Brought it down harder even than one or fifty more warnings just like all the rest would. If he asked more strongly for their faith and couldn't justify it quickly, he'd find it weakened, just as quickly.

Diplomacy _would_ help. What he needed most, though, was solid evidence that Tom had been behind that terrible Frost Giant attack. Or was behind these occasional disappearances nibbling at the borders where Muggle and Wizarding society uneasily brushed, or that he had more planned for his cult of self-satisfied deep pockets than the usual influence-trading, market-cornering, election-stealing, and manhandling of the press.

Evidence had been thin on the ground. Villagers on the island had noticed a smell of blood before the attack, and the Aurors had found the remains of a quite Dark and quite disgusting summoning—or, rather, beckoning—ritual clearly meant to tempt the Frost Giants across the water. And temptation would have been all that was needed; water was paltry enough barrier to feet that could freeze it, save that the poor hunting to be found over the ocean made the long crossing less a less than inviting prospect, under ordinary circumstances. Whoever had cast the beckoning had been careful, and left no means of identifying himself.

As for the disappearances, the closest he'd come to a break on that front had been that horrific experience of young Peter Pettigrew's. And that had not been particularly useful. Oh, perhaps if someone had called him to the scene… but since the whole dreadful affair had taken place at a public park, the DMLE's first concern had been to make sure that no trace was left and none of the muggles remembered anything.

He'd had to rely on Peter's memories. A good deal better than nothing, but hardly the same as a thorough forensic examination with an analysis for trace magical signatures. Or the same as running one of the poor body's parts through an analytical re-transfiguration with Minerva to see exactly what had been done to it, and to work out whether either of them could recall a student who thought and worked in that way, and sending out to colleagues at other schools if they didn't.

Even if it wouldn't be a terrible surrender to hope for more trouble, there was simply no reason to think that more trouble would gather up more information. Best to let Filius change the subject, then, because at this point Albus had only one really viable avenue to pursue by way of learning anything that might convince the Confederation before Tom did anything irrevocable on an national scale. Even, perhaps, an international one; the young Riddle had from the beginning had a strong sense of his own destiny, and had never been inclined to do things by halves.

And calling the line of inquiry a 'really viable' one was a laughable exaggeration. Rather than viable, one ought perhaps to say diaphanous, or skittish. High-strung and brittle, certainly; sensitive when not surly.

It wasn't that Filius was untrustworthy by any means, but he could be excitable and, as they'd used to say, loose lips sink ships. It wasn't an especially sturdy ship to begin with. The situation was even more unstable than the young man himself. Which was quite an accomplishment, though he wouldn't express the opinion to anyone but Fawkes.

It was that instability that was the clue, though. Eileen and Lily had, between them, shown him just the carrot he needed, the one no one would get anywhere with Severus without. He just needed to make sure he could give it to the boy, and show Severus he could without its getting back to Tom. Or at least, getting back to Tom in the wrong light.

That was going to be the hard part. He'd never be able to do it on his own. Fortunately, he oughtn't to have to. And he thought he might just be able to begin arranging for the necessary assistance right now, in a quite natural way. Or, to be precise, a very unnatural way, both technically and in Filius's increasingly strident opinion.

"I suppose," he slipped his voice into his friend's diatribe on the chemicals in Muggle food, mildly but with a very slight edge of _oh dear Merlin, can we have a different subject now?_ "I might see if Horace would like to have his advanced students practice ingredient identification on melted candy canes, if it would give you any pleasure. Perhaps those extra-credit opportunities you mentioned."

"I also mentioned," Filius reminded him, with an expression indicating that Horace deserved what he was getting, "that very few students were taking him up on them any more."

"So you did," Albus agreed, pushing off the window and making his way to the Owlery door. Filius jumped off the table and followed him, levitating over the fallen feathers and mouse bones. Filch did his best up here, of course, but it was impossible to keep up and the elves and birds mutually unnerved each other. Albus suspected it was because their eyes were so similar. "Why is that, do you suppose?"

They emerged into the far more salubrious air of the cool stone stairwell, moving down towards the Great Hall and their tea. Stone was the only sort of large building to live in during the summer months. Albus couldn't imagine how muggles survived in their heat-soaking wooden houses, without cooling and air-circulating charms. Or, for that matter, without warmth-charmed tapestries, robes, and socks in winter.

"My students and Pomona's generally do their homework on time, of course," he said, "and can generally get the sort of marks their parents expect from them through their normal course-work. There's some sort of a stigma against being caught caring about schoolwork in Gryffindor these days—"

"There is?" Albus blinked, astonished. Whatever had happened to the love of glory, to the spirit of healthy competition?

"I gather it's still considered good to excel so long as one hasn't put any visible effort in," Filius explained, not impressed with this state of affairs.

One could hardly blame him, if it were true. It wasn't the sort of thing Albus had thought to keep an eye out for, particularly. Now he would, but whose eye? Academic dyspepsia didn't leave the sort of marks in the common room that house elves would notice. Sir Nicholas and Sir Cadogan were temperamentally unsuited and the Fat Lady was, while sufficiently maternal when it occurred to her to be, poorly positioned…

"I would have been inclined to blame it on a general _zeitgeist,_ myself," Filius continued, "but Minerva says everyone still remembers how offhand Potter and Black Major were about spending all their time on Quidditch and girls and harassing other students. Not that I don't enjoy a good rant in brogue, but you really ought to speak to her before she tears her hair out."

"That would be a pity," he chuckled. Minerva's hair was most impressive on those rare occasions she let it down, sleek and dark and quite as long as his own. "And Slytherin? You also mentioned something about the way Horace runs his House, I recall."

"Well," Filius shrugged with that very nearly nasty look again, "if one _will_ make it clear that one's patronage is the only reward that Really Matters, and also let everyone see that the best student one has in one's own subject can only get the most perfunctory of patronage no matter how hard he works or how well he does, one shouldn't be surprised if one's other students conclude that one doesn't feel that effort and success in said subject, and perhaps in academics generally, are particularly important. In a House that's ruled more by vague memories of which traditions were considered important last year than by rules, when some student doesn't step up to take the reins, one shouldn't be surprised if a certain ennui lingers."

They emerged onto level flagstones after a few more steps, and Albus asked carefully, "You and Horace aren't having any problems that I ought to be asking into, are you?" Their Houses generally had a touch of rivalry going, but it usually felt more friendly than this.

"No, no," Filius sighed, pulling out the candy cane and looking at it as if, in the absence of a stiff drink (which for him generally meant kirshwasser with a splash of amaretto or a shot or two of chocolate liqueur), he was very nearly tempted. "I just always hate to see a sound mind go untended. They can warp in the wrong hands, you know," he added with sad, meaningful emphasis, "or in none."

"Possibly," Albus said cautiously. He certainly did know, generally speaking. Even today he had to take a potion, some nights, to keep from lying awake wondering what had happened to make his old friend think it was right that he should snatch and reorder and command. To keep from snatching up a quill to ask him. From lying awake wondering if there was anything Albus's own parents might have done differently, or his old schoolmasters, to keep him from that same folly. Wondering whether it was only his example that had taught Aberforth differently, or if a more pedestrian intellect had guarded him, or if that was vanity speaking and Albus's abrasive, unambitious, grubby little brother had always been simply the better man. "Were you thinking of something in particular?"

"I was, in fact," Filius sighed. "The same student, as it happens. Some of them do make themselves felt more than others, and that was a year just _bursting_ with personality. And talent. Odd how you get concentrations like that sometimes. Volatile."

"Some of my divining instruments will never be the same," Albus agreed, wincing. After that terrible scare Severus and young Remus Lupin had had in '76, in fact, some of the stones of the ceiling were still scorched. Severus had submitted to reason after the first burst of temper—but it had been a quite sustained burst, especially for a teenager. It was no wonder he'd seemed subdued and empty afterwards, when he'd submitted to the oath that would protect Remus (who'd deserved protection, having been entirely responsible about his transformation and as ignorant of his friend's folly as had everyone else) and Madam Pomfrey had fetched him back to the Hospital Wing.

"I don't suppose you know he was in my music club?" asked Filius.

Albus frowned. "Severus? I don't recall him performing."

"No, I couldn't get him on stage with a crowbar and a body bind," Filius agreed. "Which was too bad; he certainly had the voice for it in his later years. He wanted to learn to incant. And first he asked me if there was anything he could do for a little private instruction, but of course I wouldn't set that sort of a precedent even if I'd had the time."

"No," Albus nodded, as they walked through the echoing, empty hall to the staff table, largely out of habit but also because they both liked the ceiling. "I quite see that."

Filius had less homework to grade than any other teacher in the school, but this was by design born of necessity. Any of eighty to two-hundred stressed out Ravenclaws might pound on his door into his office seeking academic guidance at any given moment. With very little regard for the hour, because many of them only paid attention to clocks insofar as they blared alarms explaining when to show up for classes and meals. Filius tried to encourage regular sleep, but there was only so much one could do without bed checks and sleeping potions.

He also kept up on the professional journals in his field, of course, and had been known to contribute to them when he had the time, sometimes on his own and sometimes in conjunction with alumni. At the moment, in fact, he was supervising a few projects Lily Potter and Sirius Black and their friends were working on, and occasionally chortling gleefully over something involving doorknobs the Prewett twins were doing that was slow going but sounded absolutely terrifying.

On top of that, someone from the Confederation might, at any time, ask him to create a piece of custom equipment for some field mugwump. Of any nationality; field mugwumps had to be able to go unnoticed at need and so tended to work in their own countries, but it didn't matter who made one's equipment as long as it did what one needed it to. Filius, being imaginative, was somewhat popular, although not with the Russians.

Albus had even (although this was much less common these days, thank Merlin) occasionally come to the reluctant conclusion that there wasn't anyone better suited for a covert operation. There might be a stretch of several months on end when he had almost nothing to do, aside from the everyday academic and MI-20 paperwork, but there was no predicting whether any given week would be like that or see him publicly botching his homework-summoning charms from lack of sleep.

Additionally, someone with an unpleasant mind might have misunderstood.

"Then he auditioned but said I shouldn't accept him."

Albus blinked as they sat.

"That's what I said," agreed Filius. The platters around them filled up with sandwiches, sausages, scotch eggs, fruit, meat pies, and a tureen of potato soup. "Are we quite sure they're not trying to kill us?" he asked rhetorically, taking an orange, some soup, and what looked like a watercress sandwich.

"What do you mean?" Albus blinked around a bite of banana, loading his plate up with sausages, eggs, a doorstop cheese and pickle sandwich, and a thick wedge of pork pie.

Filius rolled his eyes. "Oh, nothing. You can brew up your own heartburn remedy, I'm sure."

"That sounds a most unpleasant complaint," Albus noted. "You were saying?"

"That I hate you and your thirty-foot metabolism sometimes," Filius grumbled good-naturedly. "That I asked him what he was talking about. And he said he was selfish and if I accepted him he'd come, because he badly wanted to learn enchanting and the arithmancy connection, and he'd offered me an out anyway so it wasn't his fault, but I shouldn't because if I did everyone else would drop out."

Albus stopped halfway through a bite of pie. He forced himself to go on chewing, and to swallow, and washed out his mouth with a sip of pumpkin juice. Its spices weren't particularly satisfying when it was so likely that one had failed to notice children being collectively and horribly unchildlike. "Didn't your group have a drop in enrollment around '74? You didn't mention it, but I do recall the choir being rather small that year."

"Around then, yes," Filius said, peeling his orange with grim amusement. "The '73-'74 year. And then he came to me next day after class and said if I wanted he could probably arrange for some of the older students to make a scene about forcing him to withdraw and then I'd probably get everyone back, only he really did want to learn enchanting, wasn't there anything we could do about it."

"How terribly Slytherin," Albus frowned, cutting into his pie again.

"Ye-es," Filius agreed judiciously, "but not the way you're thinking, which is what I thought at first, too."

"What did you do?"

"Well, first I accused him of racketeering, of course." But Filius looked a little ashamed of himself. "And then he started screaming his head off at me that there was nothing dishonest about it, he'd warned me and I had only myself to blame, it wasn't his fault I was too thick to believe a good-faith warning just because it came from someone shorter than myself—which he wasn't anymore, of course; I thought that was interesting—I of all people ought to know better, and ye elder _gods_ the hysteria…"

"I'm familiar with it," Albus assured him, wincing.

"I daresay you are," Filius chuckled ruefully. "I got some tea into the boy before he made himself literally sick, although I had to repair a couple of cups afterwards."

" _Quite_ familiar with it... What did you do?"

"Told him I'd rather have a handful of students who were there to learn than a stage-full who were in it for glamour and glory, so if he didn't show up to at least the first five meetings to be a good example he'd be getting detentions on top of the two weeks' worth he'd earned himself for the disrespect and the fit he'd just thrown."

"Oh, dear," Albus chuckled. "I imagine he didn't like that."

"You would imagine, wouldn't you," Filius said seriously, catching his eyes. "In fact he looked at me as if I'd drawn down the moon especially for his benefit. He didn't argue about the detentions at all, just went all big-eyed and white and ran out like he didn't know what to say, and turned up as ordered. And didn't say a word to me without being forced to for two weeks, but I'd swear he was throwing stinging hexes under the table when the other students weren't paying attention. I caught him outright kicking the Lockhart boy in choir for looking at a magazine inside his score-sheet. It was as if he just didn't know how to handle… well, I don't know how to put it. But I had the feeling he was getting lost down there. A waste."

"A not unfamiliar thought," admitted the Headmaster, carefully slicing a sausage. Almost against his will, because of the ill-feeling, he asked, "Did you mention it to Horace? Only, that is the sort of response to being asked to be a good example that, in other Houses, might have led to a Prefecture. After some polishing, of course."

Filius nodded, looking glum. "I did, actually. And he said he knew what I meant, but Snape was better off as the power behind the throne than on it."

"Oh, dear," Albus frowned. "I would have hoped, with how fond he was of Lily, that he would have taken the opportunity to advance a half-blood who could handle it."

"Credit where due," Filus told him, "he said he would have liked to, if it had been anyone else and if some of the students from more fanatical families wouldn't have had a less than pureblooded peer-authority outright murdered. And I asked didn't he have enough control of his house to make sure that didn't happen, and," he trailed off into a snort.

"Don't leave me in suspense!" Albus urged, daring to hope the story wasn't going to end somewhere ugly.

It didn't. With a grin, Filius said, "Well, Horace had a point, I thought. He said you can't have the snarling guard dog holding its own leash, there has to be an indulgent owner for the terrified masses to take their complaints to."

"And be told 'he's just an old soppy, really'?" Albus asked thoughtfully, smiling. "I'll tell Barty Crouch to try that the next time someone screams at him about Alastor."

"Complaining to Barty Crouch about Alastor Moody is like asking your fireplace for a bandage because you've burned your finger lighting a candle," Filius observed.

"He is, at least, invested in seeing things done in the right way…"

"Which one are you talking about? And please define 'right way.' And if you meant Crouch, don't you mean 'having it seen'?"

"So unkind, Filius." They were veering off track, so he told his friend, looking up with a twinkle, "I gave Severus your compliments when he interviewed for the DADA post, you know. He turned quite pink."

"Did he really?" Filius asked, delighted.

Albus wasn't disappointed to see that his delight was as innocent as Severus's confused flush had been. As devoutly as new gossip always was to be wished for, admiration between a teacher and student was only amusing if it went strictly in one direction. He wasn't surprised, either. Severus had been a rather unprepossessing student, and that was how Filius would remember him.

"I wonder you didn't support his candidacy," he wondered disingenuously, "given…" he waved a vague hand with half a sausage on his fork.

"Don't be silly, Albus, Robards was the right fit," Filius blinked owlishly. Or, perhaps more properly, eaglishly. After swallowing a mouthful of sandwich, he added, "Anyway, this isn't a young man's job. You need gravitas, you need to have gotten the itch out of your feet, you need to be able to look them in the eye and know that no matter what they throw at you, you've seen a hundred things a hundred times worse. You certainly need to have everyone you were at school with yourself out of the building."

"Oh, really, they aren't monsters," Albus protested.

Filius smiled, looking down at the empty Ravenclaw table. "Of course they're not. But they dive if they smell blood, you know. They get uneasy if the adults aren't in control, whether they realize it or not, and they do _test_ one. It wouldn't matter so much if you'd had to replace Bathsheba, say, or even me, but dangerous classes like DADA and CoMC need a teacher who can take command instantly, whether or not they like the kids. You can't give it to a nervous chap who might get flustered in a crisis. Even if the lad could manage a class, I doubt Madam Pomfrey could keep him in ulcer cures."

"Well, I quite agree with you about Robards," Albus said, "and let us hope for a year of relative poltergeist-related peace. But I'm sure Severus would wish me to remind you," he added with a little smile, "that he can make his own ulcer cures."

Filius chuckled. Taking another bite of sandwich, he asked around it, "What _is_ he doing these days?"

Albus told him. He made sure, though, to emphasize the lab's precarious financing, to underline Severus's status as an apprentice but not to mention his seniority. He also made sure to explain the stage of development the Wolfsbane potion was at.

People like Filius couldn't bear the interminable, fiddly, scientific stage towards the end of a complex potions or alchemy research project. Not that Filius was a shallow intellect, as some Charms specialists were. He could and did buckle down to assimilate a new spellcasting language as needed, or learn all about a new class of objects or materials to enchant.

That stage in R&D brewing, though, when the formula was _so very nearly_ doing what one wanted and surely if one just adjusted the quantity of this ingredient, or chopped that one to a different coarseness, or adjusted the temperature at this stage, or tried a different stirring pattern here, or used an amethyst tool here instead of oak, or a copper knife instead of silver, or picked that ingredient at a different time of day or month or used a different subspecies…

It wasn't Albus's favorite part of the process by any means. He'd even seen his own mentor hurl a fireball into a cauldron once, and his old teacher had literally all the time in the world to spend on any project he cared to. As he'd hoped, Filius was looking appalled. "And Horace is just letting him rot there?"

"Oh, hardly rotting," Albus protested. With conviction, even, although not vehemently enough to be terribly convincing.

"Oh, come off it, this is Horace," Filius said cynically. "He could have the boy apprenticing to Nicholas Flamel for his mastery if he wanted."

"No, I don't think Nicholas is looking for an apprentice," Albus said thoughtfully. "And I'm afraid he doesn't take Horace terribly seriously in any case."

Filius stopped cold and gave him one of those _oh… right… you're ALBUS DUMBLEDORE_ looks.

Albus took a bite of his own sandwich, and made sure to squirt the pickle into his beard. "Oh dear," he sighed dismally, and dabbed delicately at himself with his napkin before giving it up as a bad job and cleaning up with his wand. That had done the trick, though; Filius's expression had reverted to _can't be let out without a minder_. Infinitely preferable.

"Well, you know I prefer not to interfere with any of you," he said with the barest touch of apology as he put his wand away, "and, of course, he is graduated in any case."

"Oh, of course," Filius agreed hastily, failing to look innocent as only a shrewdly sweet-hearted man of goblin descent could. "Meddling with other people's alumni would be _terrible_ manners."

* * *

**Q &A Teaser!**

**Louise** : What condiment are you? (Possibilities: HP Sauce, ketchup, Grey Poupon, mango chutney, tzatziki sauce, sriracha, soy sauce, organic basil olive oil, chipotle mayo, blah blah blah)

Author: Who you askin—  
Gilderoy: I don't need condiments! Or cosmetics! I'm perfect as is, I only want to put out a line of hair care products to help other, SAD people, like poor Severus! WHY WOULD YOU ASK THAT?!  
Everyone: ….  
Lily: The lady doth protest—  
Severus: Lily. No.  
Lily: No? Yes he does.  
Severus: Yes, but no. Everyone was thinking it already. So you don't say it. No. See, this is why I told you you needed to be in Slytherin: you're nearly as bad at this as I am.  
James: Actually, no, because when she's lame it's adorable and when you are it's pathetic and creepy and weird.  
Evan: I swear on Merlin's staff the entire readership disagrees with you.  
Author: YOU WERE COLLECTIVELY ASKED A QUESTION… and while you've been squabbling, Lucius has given Gilderoy gangrene in his face fighting to get to Wikipedia first to claim the classiest sauce.  
Everyone: Are we meant to care?

 

 **Daashi:** A non-spoilery question. I suppose asking everyone (Snape and his peers) what they want to do for a living or what their retirement plans are, would kind of be a tad inappropriate.

 **Remus** : (SIGH)

 **Lucius** : … _Earning a living,_ good gracious, how vulgar. (laughs lightly)

 **Reg** : Is 'retiring' like when Dad and Granddad mostly stopped doing committees and working the elections and things and started hiding away from Mother in their studies with the bottles? Can I do something else? 

**1990s!Severus:** AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (continues laughing like a psychopath all the way down to his office, cloak swirling, terrifying all the first-through-third years and Hufflepuffs. Closes door, stops cackling, pours tea, puts on TSO, grades papers.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Severus can tell from about 500 miles away that Filius has terrible manners. Because ~~paranoid~~ Slytherin.
> 
>  **Notes** : Yes, the Russian Minister for Magic title-equivalent is partially named after Rasputin. Because it ought to be. :p


	52. Wolfsbane Lab, St. Mungo's, Next Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus brews a potion, has a tantrum, schemes, is a tea snob, sees plots everywhere, and examines career-advancing favors for unexploded bombs. So probably it's Tuesday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : your erratically-humble narrator's head is not like other people's. It is, as you were warned in chapter one, dry-yet-supersaturated, convoluted, and parenthetical, with a chip on its shoulder the size of Hogwarts. Did I say Hogwarts? Let's try 'the UK.' (Also, music)
> 
>  **A/N** : I'm starting classes this week and am not sure what that will do to my schedule. Naturally, reviews are always inspiring (bats eyes)... seriously, I will try to keep up but I have never had even a part time job while taking two grad-level classes before, and I can't be sure how this will work. It's possible that the next post will be something else rather than a new chapter, not sure.
> 
> No Q&A today. It's not just that I got behind on replies; Severus would not be having with this nonsense in his chapter.

“Severus, m’boy, I hoped I’d find you here!”

“You knew you’d find me here, Professor,” Severus said evenly, scatter-dropping pinches of powdered sunflower seed-and-moldavite into his cauldron while stirring, slow and steady. _Widdershins two DROP-three four five DROP-six deosil two DROP-widdershins two three DROP-four…_ “As I work here and these are working hours. I am, as you see, working as we speak.”

“Yes, of course, I—what on earth is this noise?”

He sighed. Lava would freeze inside the earth’s core before he attempted to explain metal to the nonagenarian head of Slytherin House. Even a head of Slytherin that cooed ecstatically over Lily.

Lily was someone even the most traditional wizards could wrap their minds around, whatever her parentage: a proper English rose if you didn’t look deep enough to notice the charging erumpent and pig-stubborn streaks (or was that included in the definition?). They could wrap their minds around the music she thought was catchy, too, even the modern drek. Such _nice_ , _sweet, soulful_ little ditties. _Lily_ thought _Imagine_ was the be-all and end-all rather than suitable only as a substitute for sleeping potions _._

Or she had thought so. He wondered if she still did. It was almost beyond dreaming that he might be able to find out now; the thought was a tiny, fragile iridescent soap bubble that would pop if he breathed on it.

Yet there it was. Mad. Incredible. Un, one should excuse the expression, imaginable. He wondered if he’d dare to ask her, and if so, whether he’d greedily grab at the next chance or save it for a birthday present to himself. Sometimes one couldn’t quite predict oneself in advance, regardless of intention.

Not that it mattered. It was the chance to waste questions on things that _didn’t_ objectively matter that mattered, that was the miracle.

They’d played quoting in the hospital. He’d never expected to have that again.

Evan smiled in warm recognition when he quoted books they’d read together, even sometimes referenced them himself when they were alone, but it wasn’t the same. Ev hadn’t grown up reading them with him, it wasn’t a… a twin-language, a dialect, a code. Severus’s pureblood friends had a language of implicit connotation they kept trying to share with him, but you had to grow up with a language or be immersed for it to come naturally, for all the connections to be fluid and comfortable.

Severus was getting better, but he’d started very nearly young enough and immersed himself as if his life depended on it. Which it had. It was too late for Ev to learn to have, for example, conversations using only language that skittered across only ten plays because the tragedies weren’t allowed, which meant that using The Merchant of Venice or the Taming of the Shrew was going to start an argument.[[1]](https://www.fanfiction.net/docs/edit.php?docid=40390498#_ftn1)

She’d let him kick her ankle, and leave her with Evan, who she didn't like any more than he liked her, though at least he’d never been lumped in with Mulciber and Avery (which was another minor miracle. It was probably to do with Ev’s general air of _this is all very nice but I’d much rather be watching clouds/having a kip/snogging somebody about whom I am currently fantasizing, mmm lazy snogging on the grass_ ). And when Severus had gotten back, she’d _still been there_ , waiting, willing to argue with him. Willing, for once in her life, to listen.

That would be Ev’s doing. Making the impossible happen all around him without actually doing anything to make it happen was his genius, and he’d turned it on for Severus despite despising Lily. Obviously there was no such thing as karma: Severus could nearly believe he’d somehow earned Black in a previous life, if those were a truth (surely not Potter; if he’d been evil enough to deserve Potter he wouldn’t have come back human at all, let alone with magic), but not Evan. Certainly not both of them. It wasn’t sense.

Slughorn was looking at him in plaintive horror. Not because of tempting fate with a disbelief in karma. Slughorn had never shown signs of legilimency. Then… why?

The way thought went faster than sound was occasionally inconvenient. One could so easily lose track.

Right—the Rush. And he’d gone light today, since Belby was in and might come in to check his work. He took a moment to imagine Slughorn’s reaction to Deep Purple, but did not allow himself to snort, or even smirk.

“Master Belby believes a strong beat helps maintain stirring patterns over the course of a long stretch of brewing,” he evaded impatiently. Of course, Belby’s idea of a strong beat was Celestina Warbeck (gag) and, if he felt very daring, the Hobgoblins. Neither of whom had ever apparently even _heard_ of syncopation.

It was too bad Sluggy hadn’t come on a jazz day. He probably could have dealt with that, or something brassy and swinging and big-bandish, the sort of music that wasn’t for listening to, exactly, but turned brewing into… he wouldn’t call it a dance. He didn’t dance. Certainly not. Unfortunately for the Slug, Severus had been having trouble sleeping, but not nearly enough to justify taking a potion for it. He’d been really needing the heavy beat these last few days.

 _DROP-five six deosil DROP-two STOP and NEXT._ Pulling heat out of the fire until it felt right, which was a process he’d hardly given any thought to since he was about thirteen, he added, “The player is in the corner. I’d rather you turned it off than down.”

Slughorn did, trying not to look too obviously relieved. The silence fell like a hammer, but there wasn’t even time to hear any simmering from the cauldron before Slughorn asked, “That was never toasted sunflower seed I smelled there, going into a potion that’s all about lunar influence?”

“We’re trying it,” Severus told him, impatience subsiding in favor of what was, if he was honest (which he wasn’t going to be, even in front of his old teacher: too embarrassing), rabid curiosity about what this batch was going to do. “We’ve been trying a few solar-ruled things to fight the moon-pull, with and without transformational and mediating ingredients. Occasionally fascinating yet, although none useful to purpose yet; remind me later to tell you what happened when we used a gold cauldron and compensated with aconite and sunflower honey and gypsy moth wings, good _god_.”

“Hm!” Slughorn noted. Severus was very mildly relieved to see that he looked genuinely interested. He didn’t think Sluggy had even considered using a new textbook in decades, and it had been two to one whether the man knew significantly more theory than the school covered.

“This batch,” he went on, “we’re using a silicate that’s noted for its transformational magical properties in object-enchantment and has had as much interaction with outer space as you’re going to find on Earth without using an actual recent meteorite. We’re hoping it might bring some mediating qualities since, as you say, it _is_ between a lunar problem and a solar ingredient. And not ameliorated by being in a honey form this time.”

He gave it a beat, but Slughorn didn’t notice the _mel- is the honey root word_ joke. Of course he didn’t. It had been far too much to hope. He didn’t even get a suspicious look, let alone a pained one or a groan. Severus sighed, and added, “Only one has to hope it won’t work.”

“Why’s that?” Slughorn asked, blinking the glaze out of his eyes. He’d started doing that more and more once Severus had advanced to NEWT study, but Severus quite simply had no mercy to give in this area. Potions might not be Slughorn’s vocation, but Potions Master was his _job,_ right through to the advanced levels, and if he didn’t have his craft-mastery he’d had plenty of time to get it. Summers, at least.

And you were not supposed to have to dumb down your homework for your teachers. That Was Wrong.

“We currently believe there to be a limited and nonrenewable supply,” he said grimly now, and absolutely did not take any sardonic enjoyment from watching Slughorn need a moment to translate that into _the world could run out._ No indeed.

If the man had been actually stupid, that would have been one thing. Severus knew better. In his own ways, he was brilliant, a genuine genius in areas like networking where Severus barely knew the alphabet. He was also, however, so lazy it boggled Severus’s mind he was still employed.

No, Evan was lazy. Languid. Evan had found himself (well, been born into, but then made his own) work that let him sit and chat with people all day, which was what he liked to do, and have quite a lot of free time for wandering around finding other people to chat with and get new business from, and sleeping in, and going to working parties he actually enjoyed (the space alien). He arranged his time with ruthless efficiency so that he was never, ever hurried. Languorous, leisurely… graceful, where grace was defined as the quintessence and crossroad of effectiveness and efficiency. Still, like a red-gold swan drifting over quiet sunset waters, no hard-paddling webbed feet, riptides, or swiftly-turning mental gears visible under those serene and sleepy eyes. Feather-bedrock.

But the Slug was lazy like a sloth. He’d picked a job you had to keep alert for, and he just _didn’t do it_. Not really. Severus _knew_ he didn’t, because, well, he’d been there. Yes, Slughorn showed up for class and ran it and more-or-less corrected homework, more-or-less on time, but that was about it. He barely kept up with the journals, if at all—oh, he got them, but when Severus, as a student, had borrowed them, they mostly hadn’t had any sticky patches or cracked spines no matter how old they were. He hung around the cauldrons of his favorite students in class, instead of paying attention to the reliable safety hazards.

And if he did anything more as Head of House than was set down in the school charter, well, Severus had never seen him do it. Or benefited from it. And Severus’s year could have used a little adult intervention.

Or a lot. At the time, he’d thought it would have just made things worse. Now he was out of it and his head had cleared, though, he thought, if the teachers had put their feet down hard enough, early enough, wouldn’t the bastards have learned that the bullying wasn’t just something not to get caught at but genuinely frowned on?

It hadn’t been just Slughorn who didn’t rein them in, and they’d had wealth and looks and blood on their side to convince him they were worth not alienating, to tempt him into indulgence. But they weren’t the only problem Slughorn didn’t bother with, either. He just could not be interested in anyone in whom he didn’t see solid potential for the advancement of his spiderweb.

Anyone or anything. It wasn’t just the journals he didn’t read, Severus was almost sure. He’d seen Slughorn in bookstores. He browsed the new offerings, skimmed everything, walked off without buying, and then made facile references later. It was one of those things Severus had badly, _badly_ wanted to take Lily’s approach about and just tell everyone what the man was doing. Loudly.

Only you couldn’t do that, if you were Slytherin, because it was a stupid and self-destructive thing to do. Needing to learn not to be stupidly self-destructive was _exactly why_ Severus had been so dead set on one of the cool-toned Houses he’d been willing to light the Hat on fire.

It might have thought sending him to Slytherin was a punishment for setting its brim smoking. He still thought it was an honorable compromise he’d gotten the better of. Even if had put him under the lack-of-care of a man who’d probably been letting his brain rust for at least three decades, possibly six. It had also put him in the actual-care of people worth caring about, who happened not only to have enough power that their care was effective but to know how to use it when he could bear to let them.

Still, Slughorn wasn’t actually stupid, beneath the torpor, and when he roused himself he could ask intelligent questions and follow the answers. They talked about the potion for a while, therefore, while Severus worked, because only Gryffs and Ravens and idiots got down to business right away.

Well, and Severus, when he could get away with it. But he was their year’s Honorary Raven (there was nearly always at least one, although sometimes they were just intelligent hard workers or obsessed with good marks, not really _interested in knowing things._

He thought Lily should have been another, but she’d been too pretty and popular to get labeled a swot, even though she wasn’t a great Quidditch fan. Just as Lupin had been too tight with a popular and sporty crowd to be thought of like that, as well as too chronically behind with his work from ‘illness’).

So, Severus had reigned in (if one could say it without asphyxiating from the irony) solitary splendor. He’d taken advantage of the uniqueness of his position by carefully cultivating his reputation for only choosing to exercise good manners on a highly selective basis, on the premise that everyone thought he was bizarre and unpleasantly uncivilized anyway so he might as well.

In point of fact he had to, and at school had _really_ had to. If he’d tried to use pureblood manners all the time, everyone would have accused him of being a climber. This way, they knew he could polish up when it was called for but wasn’t trying to pretend to be something he wasn’t. Besides, it saved time in so many, many ways, and anyone he _did_ waste time with (and had a brain) was flattered. Which often saved him effort and trouble as well, and sometimes even money.

Polish was always mandatory with Slughorn, though. He was only interested in you given proof you could conduct yourself in a way that would redound to his credit. So Severus put up with what was, between brewers, small talk.

And with actual small talk, too, wound between the technical questions: Severus asking after his old professors and the Slytherins he knew who hadn’t graduated yet, Slughorn asking about Evan and Reg and the Malfoys and whether Severus thought Míngyùe and Xenophilus were going to try for a baby soon.

The thought of Phil in charge of a child, even with Míngyùe to calm him down, nearly made Severus spasm his grip on the sliced sea cucumber and splurt half of it into the cauldron at once. As soon as Slughorn asked the question, Severus had realized that the answer was _very likely_ , because Phil had no sense and Míngyùe had faith and they were both hopeful people who liked bright colors and weren’t very interested in nightlife and Míngyùe had been _brought up_ _traditionally_ _oh god…_

Eventually, though, Slughorn’s voice took on that ever-so-slightly-too-casual note that meant getting down to business. “You do sound busy!” he chortled.

“Moderately,” Severus agreed, making sure to sound dry rather than suspicious. _Deosil two three four DROP-TURN Deosil two three four DROP-TURN…_

“I don’t suppose you can have had much of a chance to progress on your masterpiece,” Slughorn hinted broadly.

Severus’s mind went instantly to his Charms project. The suite of memory spells he was calling the Adamantine Slate was progressing nicely, thank you, as a matter of fact, and he would have felt confident in saying so except that he probably wasn’t going to submit them either to British Spellcrafters or Internationale Charmsmaîtres Extraordinaire. He didn’t have any idea what the Dark Lord was going to ask him to do next, or do next himself.

That being the case, it seemed like quite a good idea not to let on that he’d worked out how to prevent a memory from taking root, or prevent the details from being remembered but allowing the impressions to remain, and was getting (he thought) quite close to being able to sort of box up a memory and put it away until it was wanted. Whether you called it Discretion, like Evan did, Plausible Deniability, or screamed CONSTANT VIGILANCE like that auror who kept popping up behind Lucius in the Ministry and making him twitch, being Slytherin meant you occasionally sacrificed glory to the gods of Not Being A Complete Soon-to-be-Bloody Imbecile.

But Slughorn wouldn’t have been asking about his charmsmithing anyway. “The review board agreed to accept my work here in lieu of an individual project,” he said, no longer able to keep from sounding wary, “when Master Belby approximated my contribution to the research for them, provided my exam went well and my thesis—”

“Oh, Severus,” Slughorn winced at ‘thesis,’ “you needn’t try to get your mastery from IAMB, you know. The Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers—”

Was exactly the sort of organization one would have expected Slughorn to belong to. More of an old boy’s club with a potions theme than a potions guild, it put out a publication Severus was physically incapable of reading without ripping in half, hurling across the room, or drowning in red ink. Case in point, their accreditation requirements were pure fluff.

As far as Severus was concerned, an MP was meaningless. He’d gotten _that_ three months after graduation, using a potion he’d come up with in fifth year (he still wasn’t resigned to the name ‘Draught of Peace,’ it was so pretentious, but Narcissa had threatened him with her pointiest shoes), it was pathetic. ‘Society’ was right; he suspected he could safely have mucked up at least thirty percent of the exam as long as he’d come in wearing clothes Ev and Narcissa had bullied him into and not actually blown up the guildhall.

A BM, now, _that_ was worth sweating for. He wouldn’t consider himself a Potions Master until he was a Braumeister, whatever incredibly gaudy nods to networking were (of social necessity) hanging up in his office. The peer review culture in the International Association of Master Brewers was rigorous to the point that Severus hadn’t exaggerated when he’d called it a piranha tank. When he’d been particularly good, Belby delegated articles to him for second-eye editing and commentary, and let him listen to the shocked Howlers.

Evan had watched him at it once, told him if he was going to make gloating cat in cream faces he should apply them to ice cream or other appropriately lickable targets, and tackled him before Severus had worked out he wasn’t speaking entirely literally and stopped looking for the ice cream he thought was about to be shoved into his face (Evan did occasionally shove junk food at him; Severus had never worked out why. Ev liked them and Severus wasn’t much interested, and the only reason to eat useless things was for enjoyment, surely).

This wasn’t embarrassing; he’d been deeply engaged by explaining life, the universe, and the scientific method to some Austrian twice his age and Evan hadn’t even given him a full second to process what he was hearing before hauling him away from the writing desk. Lazy, decidedly. Slow, only when he felt like it.

Sadly, people seemed to be catching on. It had, alas, been inevitable; they didn’t at all have the same writing style, even if Severus _could_ more or less copy his hand. Well, once you’d learned to print, learned cursive, and then several years later learned to write in calligraphy with a damned _feather,_ you knew how to learn a handwriting style. Severus was not in favor of anyone other than Evan finding this out about him. Slytherins weren’t supposed to know what barreled pens felt like.

They weren’t supposed to know cursive, either. When Evan had come home and Severus had told him what the copperplate and Palmer script Voldemort had demanded his forthcoming reports come in were, Ev had looked, for a minute, like he didn’t really understand, and then turned a couple of odd shades of pale. He’d spent the rest of the evening sneaking glances at his watch. It was a Family Watch, one of the keeping-track-of-one’s-House clocks (Evan occasionally glared at Severus for not being on it and then nagged him about formalizing their relations as if he didn’t understand what a reeking, decaying albatross that would hang around his neck, the mule): a coming of age gift from his father.

His father, whose childhood friendship with the Dark Lord was the primary reason they were both twisted up with him in the first place. The Dark Lord, whose blood everyone assumed was the purest of the pure. That evening, Severus had set aside the book they were finishing up in favor of re-reading the Just So Stories. Evan had been interested in that one, not just putting up with it to be lulled to sleep, and he wouldn’t have remembered two words in ten.

“MESoP’s internationality only encompasses Western Europe,” he reminded Slughorn, as diplomatically as he could manage. “You know I’ve always had an interest in the Eastern and shamanistic styles.”

Slughorn waggled a pudgy finger at him. “Fess up, m’boy,” he chided playfully. “You’re just in it for the challenge.”

His mouth quirked. “Not just,” he allowed. It was probably a fair cop. “In any case, they’ll allow a submission of my work-to-date on this potion when I submit my thesis. But…” he sighed.

Last year he’d expected to be done by now, but Narcissa had needed him. Werewolf access was easy, of course, but that was only half of what he needed. You couldn’t trot off to Romania and the Black Forest to research vampires when your best friend’s conviction that you were the only thing standing between her and a fourth miscarriage appeared, against all logic, not to be completely insane. And now if he wanted to leave the country, unless things really quieted down, he was going to have to think of something the Dark Lord could get out of it.

“…My research’s hit a bit of a roadblock, to be honest,” he admitted. After a beat, he added, with dark amusement, “Literally. As in, I just can’t get away to do it.”

And then he physically took a step backwards: Slughorn’s pale green eyes had lit right up, like salted fire. Speaking of which, if Severus had been practically anyone else, he would have burned his elbow under the cauldron at that point. Being himself, he’d charmed his clothes against that sort of thing and so on, and might have had a more peaceful home life if he’d been less ‘creepily’ fire-resistant himself, but it was no help against the embarrassment.

“Funny you should say that!” his old teacher gleed.

 _Unsubtle!_ Severus wailed tragically in the privacy of his head, but dedicated himself to merely looking blandly attentive.

Slughorn paused. “Er—what is it you’re looking into again, m’boy?”

Severus was quite sure he’d never asked before, or been told. “Simply put,” he started, and managed (he thought) not to even look like he was trying not to laugh when Slughorn’s face froze into a mix of relief and skepticism, “the strength of viral curses.”

“Good heavens,” Slughorn laughed, “that _was_ simply put. A third-year Hufflepuff could understand it. Didn’t think you had it in you. Ten points to Slytherin.”

“I’ve graduated,” Severus pointed out, but a corner of his mouth tugged up. “And it’s summer.”

“Does no harm to start off the year with an advantage, eh?” Slughorn winked. “Go on, then, the old man can handle a bit more than that.”

“I started off with the conventional wisdom that werewolves and vampires can bite each other without effect,” Severus said, not reacting to the suggestion he’d been underestimating his teacher. He’d been watching Slytherins for years, and he knew the difference between false vacuity, actual stupidity, and the grey area of can’t-be-arsed. _Stir top-deosil infinity signs in with willow-leaves, drop each in after two, stop ninth-cauldron-diameter from rim, do not break surface while stirring until the drop, use eight._ “And that they both recover quickly from ordinary curses as well as from physical damage, when they’re affected at all.”

He had to use measuring clamps for this step; for most potions you could cast a spell to show how far to stir, when it mattered, but this one was just so bloody _fiddly_ it was a stupid risk: any extra magic might introduce a new variable. He’d even insisted the clamps be the same metal as the cauldron throughout, rather than ceramic-washed, although even Belby said that was paranoid of him since the whole point of brewer’s ceramic was to be almost universally magically neutral. It was a pity, though, and he grudged the time spent securing them to the lip.

But you had to do it when you needed them, even if Pat didn’t think so, because, good morning, extra lumps of metal interfered with heat distribution, you couldn’t have them just sitting there the whole time, there was a reason cauldrons were never decorated, always smooth. Also a reason why Pat always had trouble in hour two and could never get quite the right juniper-green shade after adding the powdered moonstone, but tell him that.

“Damnedest thing,” Horace agreed. “Most of the vampires didn’t want anything to do with our side or Grindelwald’s in the war, you know, but the ones who did, nearly everything just washed right over them. Even the killing curses only knocked them out until moonrise.”

“I’m not as interested as some in how to classify them,” Severus said, stirring carefully, “but one can certainly see why muggles call them ‘undead,’ with the suspended aging and the body temperature and they way they don’t stay down. It’s more complicated than that with werewolves, you know,” he added, nearly turning to Slughorn in enthusiasm before he remembered he had to actually watch his hands for this step, no leeway possible.

“Oh?” Slughorn smiled.

He nodded. It was irritating when people encouraged him to elaborate when they clearly had no interest in what he was saying, but if they urged him on anyway it was their own fault. And he certainly was not _cute,_ or funny, or whatever that infuriating little smile meant.

“I think it’s the more intense lunar influence that gives the psychosomatic effect,” he said conversationally, careful not to make his tone severely dry and academic the way he wanted to in response to that avuncular look because it would be juvenile, “although that’s going to have to be another paper. But we had one case that was really fascinating, in a disgusting sort of way—one of the werewolves we wouldn’t accept as a test subject these days, but this was before we’d instituted the policy of not accepting them if they had, oh, jobs and families and so on.”

Slughorn nodded without surprise or confusion. Severus supposed Belby had been keeping him up to date about the side effects problem.

“The man was a veterinarian—he’d been bitten while working as an animal warden, he’d been muggle—and he knew, _absolutely knew_ , that chocolate is toxic to dogs. And, well, this was quite early on, we had a limited budget. More limited. We knew the potion stopped the bloodlust, even if it wasn’t good for them and didn’t have them spending the night rational yet. So they were transforming at home, once their safe areas had been inspected by the Werewolf Registry. Before that they’d been in DMLE holding cells, so at the time of the change we considered it an upgrade. But the Werewolf Registry doesn’t actually give a damn. Certainly not about werewolves, quite possibly not about life. Probably not quite as bitter a bunch as prison guards, but I shouldn’t care to do the study.”

He really wouldn’t. He _hated_ dealing with those people. He could feel their odium, their resentment at the dead-end jobs they’d ended up in, their conviction that there must be something fundamentally disgusting about him (funny, they didn’t feel that way about Pat or Míngyùe) for choosing this work when he’s had other options, crawling all over his skin. It was as bad as being in a room with Bellatrix, or Potter or Pettigrew, or Da.

And that Umbridge woman… he felt sorry for her; he had the sense she might have had something of the same sort of shock he had, but just shaking her hand had made him want to run screaming to Dumbledore, Voldemort, anyone for Occlumency lessons, to beg Reg’s da and grandfather (who didn’t like him) for books. Words like _sensitive_ and _empath_ not only felt wrong and misapplied but made him want to gag. Even if he never told anyone else, though, he couldn’t hide from himself that when he’d looked in her sweetly smiling brown eyes his heart had tried to jump right out of his mouth for no apparent reason. All he’d been able to think for a moment through the thundering adrenaline of his pulse was _This is Black Plague rage: misstep and you won’t die alone._

He mentally shook himself. He wouldn’t find out for some time whether he’d succeeded with her (she probably liked keeping people dangling… should they be courting her? Probably, damn), but at least she wasn’t here and he didn’t have to dwell. “In any case, he got out, and his local bakery had thrown out quite a lot of chocolate cake that hadn’t sold that day… or maybe it was still on the display shelves, something like that.”

“Oh, dear,” Slughorn winced. “But it _isn’t_ toxic to werewolves, is it?”

“Nothing but silver and aconite is toxic to werewolves,” Severus said flatly. “Well. Not mortally toxic. But he woke up with chocolate all over his face and ran into the clinic in a panic. We told him and _told_ him: werewolves aren’t dogs. But he got all the symptoms and was dead a week later.”

Slughorn stared.

Severus smiled without humor and went on, “Right up till the next full moon. Fortunately, they hadn’t cremated him. Unfortunately, his coffin, how shall I put this, hadn’t been completely airtight. I won’t go into the details, but the DMLE had to obliviate not only him but just about everyone who saw him until he was, er, sanitized and regenerated, including the mediwizards. They didn’t care much from a law enforcement angle; the trauma unit at St. Mungo’s asked them to find everyone and offer. It was the nightmares.”

Slughorn sidled him a _they weren’t bad enough to make_ you _accept_ look of unreadable import. It made his shoulders tighten a knot, but otherwise he ignored it.

“And you think that effect will carry over to curses?”

“Well, I can hardly do a rigorous test of the hypothesis,” Severus said dryly, and internally sneered a little as Slughorn’s face visibly collapsed in relief. Because, of course, he certainly could, if he was willing to risk lives and use the sort of magic that deserved the reputation the Dark Arts had. It was perfectly possible, logistically, and he was perfectly capable, magically.

And Slughorn knew he was, but now thought his mind didn’t work that way, hadn’t even gone there. Of course it had gone there. Of course he’d thought of that. He just wasn’t mad-scientist enough to feel that the knowledge was worth the damage it would do. Wasn’t that why the Hat had refused him Ravenclaw in the first place, because he would have tried to stop other people’s experiments for being too dangerous?

Severus’s reedwood wand wasn’t an Ollivander. Its core wasn’t unicorn, phoenix, or dragon, but kneazle whisker. Plunging in when you didn’t have to, when there was time to examine and prepare and feel your way carefully… no.

Mam had given him a lot of strange looks on the bus home from getting it, mind. Which hadn’t been at all fair, to his way of thinking. He’d ignored the jeering about his hair and his marks and the herbal he’d been trying to memorize and even his clothes, though that had smarted, and his refusal to take a day out of his life to help them sneak into the nearest cinema (not near at all) because they were all completely incompetent. It wasn’t till they’d veered towards Yer Mam Wears Army Boots that he’d sighed and put his herbal down and done his best to rip Will Callum’s arm and face off.

Not because Mam wouldn’t have been chuffed by the image, depressingly complete Gryff that she was, or because he thought the brainless, insufferable, petulant twerps actually understood what they were saying in calling her a camp follower. It was just that there were gauntlets one could get away with high-mindedly sneering at disdainfully in the name of Trying To Behave without painting Mama’s Boy and Open Season on one’s forehead and also getting it in the teeth from one’s father for being a coward and shaming the family more than usual, and then there were the other kind. He knew which were which.

Sadly, simply walking away even from the first sort was always an Open Season sort of thing, unless a sufficiently witty riposte came to mind with excellent timing, and anyway (he’d noticed over the years) people who wanted to pick a fight with him tended to bring enough of their mates to cut off his escape routes. He was not flattered.

(Much.)

“But at any rate,” he went on, “nothing’s ever been known able to cure vampirism or lycanthropy, or shake them. They don’t cure each other, they can’t even take each other over. _And,_ ” he added, turning now because he’d finished with the willow leaves and had a moment to breathe in, his own eyes lighting, “neither of them infect animals, magical or mundane. Or sapient magical beings. —Which is unfortunate, because it would make things a lot easier here at the lab if we could use actual guinea pigs or genuine lab rats.”

“Well, that’s all true,” Slughorn agreed, frowning in an I-don’t-follow sort of way.

“And they do infect muggles, squibs, and wizards alike,” Severus encouraged him to catch up. When this did not appear likely to happen, he let out a hard sigh, and went on, “So it’s possible the intractability has as much to do with the nature of humanity as with the curses. Do you know, it’s just the same when I work with slides as it is macroscopically.”

Slughorn blinked.

“In the real world,” he elaborated impatiently. “I mean, I can expose a muggle or wizard’s internal cells to transformed-werewolf saliva and they’ll be taken over, but not any animal’s. Not even other primates’.”

“…No?” Slughorn asked blankly.

“ _So,_ ” Severus nearly shouted, “it’s a curse that only affects humans. They both are! which means either that they were _crafted_ to do so or that _human cells are natural receptacles for viral curses_! Either of which would have profound implications for how we should be going about attempting to attack them!” With great difficulty, he refrained from clutching at his hair or brewing apron or thumping his hands on the workbench. “And I can’t find out which it is,” he gritted out from between his teeth, “until I can do reasonably intensive study on at least the vampiric curse.” He took in a long breath, let it out over a four-count, and then sighed more naturally and reached for the lacewing bottle.

“Why, that’s a fascinating idea, m’boy!” Slughorn beamed in his I Couldn’t Be Less Interested In What You Just Said But I’m Happy A Smart Lad Like You Is In My Collection voice. Facing away from him again, Severus felt quite safe rolling his eyes. “I’m sure you’ll go far with it. And, in fact, that’s what I came to talk to you about.”

“Oh?” he asked neutrally, and then decided, “No, wait,” because at this point the potion needed some very precise temperature changes at very precise intervals. Pat and even Belby usually called him in at this point, although Lovegood could manage it herself eight times out of ten.

Severus suspected that if they couldn’t find a way to skip this step, the damned thing was never going to be commercially viable. It needed a brewer as good at temperature magic as he and Míngyùe were, which apparently wasn’t as common an affinity even among brewers as he would have supposed. Or possibly a lab with a pet dragon and icedrake to blow over the belly of the cauldron on command. Salamanders were too small, except for one-or-two dose batches, and so was what happened when witches and wizards who weren’t hyperpowered skipping mummies like Dumbledore cast heating and cooling charms with their wands.

“I’ve got the most _wonderful_ opportunity for you!” Slughorn said, beaming again, when Severus had indicated potential distractions were safe again.

“Do you?” he asked, sliding his former Housemaster a look he didn’t even try to keep from being jaundiced enough to go unnoticed in a bowl of lemons.

Slughorn pretended not to see it, which ratcheted up Severus’s suspicions threefold. “’Deed I do!” he effused instead, and tugged a brochure out of his lapel pocket.

Severus regarded it unenthusiastically. It was sure to be warm and limp with Slughorn’s body heat, and would probably smell of his stifling honey-amber-tobacco cologne. It might have teacup stains, or even biscuit crumbs or fallen flakes of crystalized sugar ground into the spine. Potentially with sticky shreds of dried ginger or pineapple, _ugh_.

Without any real option, he took it with as much grace as possible, and handed Slughorn the stirring stick. “Five deosil, six widdershins, add a disk of sea bicorn horn every six cycles. Slip them in edgewise, don’t let them splash. If I’m not done after three disks switch this out for the willow stirring stick and keep going. The beat’s radial, not diametric; don’t lose it when you switch.” Since putting his music back on was out, he fished out Belby’s old metronome and set it ponderously clicking the right time.

“Radial?” Slughorn muttered incredulously. “Merlin’s beard.”

The swishing sounded slow enough, though, so Severus bent to the brochure. He never had gotten out of the habit of bringing whatever he was reading right up close to his eyes. He couldn’t focus if he didn’t; anything else going on might catch his attention, even if it wasn’t actually moving. Someone Else Tending To His Potion definitely would.

 _To his utter and complete astonishment,_ it was for a MESoP conference at which Slughorn was scheduled to speak. He attempted to unfuse his back teeth from each other and unclench his throat. He’d had more control than to clench his fists in the first place.

All right. Don’t assume. Yes, it _looked_ as though he was about to be asked to carry Slughorn’s bags for the pleasure and honor of being introduced around, and possibly distinguishing himself and embarrassing Sluggy’s rivals with a few snotty questions.

But that would in fact have been a wonderful opportunity for him when he was still at school, or even when he’d only just graduated. More than a year post-graduate it wouldn’t be one, would infantilize him and make people wonder what was wrong with him that he still needed his hand held. He trusted his old housemaster’s sincerity, though, if not his judgment. And for all his faults, Slughorn didn’t, as a rule, take advantage of people.

Oh, he’d drive a hard bargain when money was involved, and he could poach with the best when it came to ingredients, but mutual advancement was his game. He wasn’t like Lucius, either, for whom the best result was ‘we’ve helped each other, but while I’ve in fact come out far better than you, you think you owe me.’ To Slughorn, the glorious win was ‘I’ve helped you (and gotten some other very personally-satisfactory but not necessarily in any way consequential things done on the side in the process) and you, with your new power, will always love me for it because we both know I don’t particularly need anything from you and didn’t have to.’

So look again.

Slughorn was, as expected, in the last full-gathering slot, doing his usual screed on Making! Learning! Potions! Fun!

Which Severus had to admit he was good at, both the speech and in practice. Although whether making learning potions was fun was a good _idea_ , given how much fun Certain People had had with practical experimentation at Severus’s expense in their class, was another matter. Regardless, it was a good speech, due to being liberally speckled with anecdotes promoting Slughorn’s most colorful students and reputedly never the same twice.

Severus doubted he’d ever appeared in it. Lily and Black had, he knew. Which was jannock and jam as far as he was concerned, all copacetic. No one who showed up in that speech ever came to anything in the field, no matter how talented they were. Other fields, often, even usually, but never yet in potions. What got highlighted was playful enthusiasm, usually slapdash and/or with entertaining results. Not a club Severus wanted into.

Lily wasn’t slapdash, but Slughorn had just raved about her all the time, only a little to prove he Wasn’t Prejudiced, You Know—and, in fairness, she’d had some fairly remarkable accidents when she’d been sure she knew what the instructions were after the first read-through and hadn’t bothered to double-check. She was good at potions, but she really did belong in that speech where Severus didn’t: her heart was in Charms, and it showed in her methodology.

Apart from the inevitable Slug, the major speakers were an Austrian alchemist (also an IAMB member; Severus had read one or two of her articles in _Monthly Stirrings_ ) lecturing on applications for a new copper alloy she’d stabilized (!) and a mugwump with a Grecian name who planned to tell everyone about a black market ring Severus had already heard a great deal about from Rodolphus.

He wondered whether, this being MESoP and since the mugwump was apparently a member rather than a guest-lecturer, the tone of her speech was going to be more along the lines of _here is how to protect yourself from being killed and/or arrested,_ as the Confederation would no doubt prefer, or _and should you meet a wizard wearing pink lilac in his hat, absolutely do not tell him that the cinders fly high in Malta for the best discounts, no, no, you must summon a mugwump or auror at once._

The presentations one would have to choose between were the usual convention fare. There were ministry and hospital brewers from various nations teaching recipes whose patent-holders had died that year. Herbalists and researchers would be lecturing on ingredients newly discovered, newly rediscovered, new to Europe, or simply, in their opinions, underappreciated. Younger research brewers, mostly ten to thirty years older than Severus (some people only started working seriously after their children finished school), would be would be camped out on tables in the halls between the lectures, explaining why their projects were amazing without teaching anyone how to replicate them, trying to make a name for themselves.

Standard-issue convention, thoroughly whitebread. The super-gasp-special catch me I’m fainting amazingness must be in the details. He pored over it again. Nothing popped out at him about the subjects of the presentations, and the location was of no use whatsoever to his thesis. Typical of Sluggy to pounce on _I can’t get away_ and pretend not to notice that the away-to-where mattered enormously, when it suited him not to notice he was offering something irrelevant to requirements.

Though he couldn’t deny that there was something appealing, in a lonely way, about the thought of visiting Devon. It was so tightly snarled up with his mother’s family; the city council’s coat of arms still had Plantagenet arms on them, under the ship. And if he was feeling particularly ridiculous, one could see if Dartmoor was swarming with Sherlockian muggles. Perhaps even, if he dressed to blend and put on his hometown body language and tuned his voice to someone else’s accent and pulled his hair back, have the kind of conversation he absolutely wasn’t allowed to have with anyone ever.

Evan’s reaction to such a different landscape would be delicious however it landed. He’d certainly enjoy any chance to paint Mesolithic skulls that could be arranged. And the sea.

Probably anything other than posed people paying him to be paint them prettily, come to think of it. Severus thought he’d been getting a bit bored with bend-stretch-turn-thank-you-now-in-whatever-else-you-want-to-be-able-to-wear-please yes-you’re-lovely-er-no-I-will-not-be-taking-you-home-but-absolutely-we-can-have-tea-while-I-pick-your-brain-did-I-mention-that-frock-flatters-you-enormously-well-chosen-who-did-you-learn-couture-from-oh-my-what-an-interesting-person-they-sound-you-must-have-had-such-lovely-times-together…

Severus would have been homicidally bored with this routine before he’d gotten through it once. Or just homicidal. Evan was astonishing, or possibly just insane. Certainly he couldn’t be blamed for beginning to find it tedious after two years. In that case, however, it was more or less Severus’s duty to Wizarding Britain and possibly the galaxy to divert him, and quickly.

Slughorn cleared his throat, a little desperately.

“See the opal in the linen net pouch?” Severus directed without looking up. “Same pace, one deosil, one widdershins, then nothing for ten seconds, repeat for three minutes.”

Slughorn muttered something that sounded like _playing with an old man_.

“The directions are in the stillroom book,” Severus said, still without looking up, “red book on the hook, but if you put the stirring on hold to read them now because you doubt me, and foul up my batch, you’re explaining it to Belby.”

“That’s two inches thick!”

“Two and a half, but the paper’s thicker than parchment,” Severus said, judiciously and absently meticulous.

They’d started off using expanding parchment. It had been very high-quality parchment, too, one of the lab’s few luxuries (he hadn’t been lying to Umbridge about the coffee-pot, he’d only withheld that his hard-earned competence at reparative spells had let him fix it) With all the alterations they’d had to constantly make, though, even that hadn’t held up. A binder they could pop index cards of single instructions in and out of, he’d argued, was more practical. His victory had been contingent on him going into Muggle London to procure these arcane items himself, but that was acceptable.

Someday he’d get up the nerve to talk Evan into going with him when he went for replacements. He was almost sure it would be more hilarious than horrific. He was positive Evan would like him in muggle clothes which weren’t over five years old and third-hand at least. He’d thought tailored suit jackets were terribly naughty on Wilkes, Severus recalled. Ev was sure to enjoy black denim as long as he wasn’t asked to wear it himself, and Severus did like the secure, armored feeling, as long as he had a long enough coat over, once they left the flat, so no one else could _see_ it being tight…

Yes, that would probably be a good bribe or gift someday. Withhold until appropriate. Today he was dealing with probably less pleasant but potentially more productive nonsense.

(Piffle, he mentally amended, with a very private smile, slightly ashamed of himself.)

Something in the actual presenters, then? He was familiar with a few of the names, even knew some of them, for a given value of ‘knew.’ Had even been to school with one or two of the British ones, mostly Ravenclaws…

…No.

Without really thinking about it, Severus pulled out his wand and did a silent guarded-summoning charm. A moment later, his copy of _Nature’s Nobility_ had made its way out of his office and into his hand (without breaking any glassware. The accio was, like most popular spells, overrated). It was always a good idea to keep the latest edition handy, in case someone trickily-allied came into the office.

He flipped rapidly through the pages, checking against the presenters, and then closed the book. He’d been right. It wasn’t just ‘mostly’ Ravenclaws. Other than Slughorn, it was all of them.

“Professor Flitwick’s been gloating?” he inquired, sliding Slughorn an amused eyebrow.

Possibly nothing in his life had ever gotten him in more trouble than being addicted to that vexed, impressed look. He tried, he really did, but it was his absolutely favorite one on a human face, and sometimes he just couldn’t help himself.

He generally didn’t like people to look proud of him, which was something that he gathered made other people feel good (Belby had suggested he try this on Pat and Míngyùe and praise them a lot). Proud was patronizing, suggested he’d been set up for a victory or pushed into it, although he didn’t mind it from Narcissa because she was usually faking a bit to save face and she knew he knew it. Or from Mam, because of course she _had_ made him, to a point, so fair enough.

Evan had long since been officially reclassified as ‘space alien,’ so if there were expressions on his face that Severus preferred, that wouldn’t have counted even if he hadn’t been blatantly cheating by playing havoc with Severus’s chemistry. Really it wouldn’t. When he acted normally proud of Severus, it was because Severus had learned something Ev had taught him, and that was acceptable. More usually his version of ‘proud’ fell somewhere between ‘warmly astonished,’ ‘warmly satisfied without surprise’ and smugly proprietary with embarrassing snuggling of Severus’s arm and smirky looks at passers-by, who were generally eyeballing them with raised eyebrows.

This made Severus want to die a little, and he didn’t think it was ever going to convince anyone that Ev was in his right mind for throwing in his lot with an ill-bred mudblood of no connections who had to work, but, well, Ev was rich enough to get classed as eccentric rather than insane, so he was safe enough. And as long as Severus allowed his abject humiliation to show, he didn’t look like a gold-digger or make Evan look like a gullible fool.

But Slughorn was Slytherin, and thought Severus was his, in a way, and he could turn on a dime. He beamed almost at once, rolling easily from crestfallen disappointment at having his surprise ruined and/or his secret uncovered to pleasure at Severus’s cleverness. Then he turned again, all just-slightly overblown and very conspiratorial pathos. “You do see we have to uphold the honor of the House, m’boy?” he coaxed.

Severus didn’t groan or scrub his eyes out loud. Yes, he did have House pride, but good grief. He just pointed out, pragmatic and unmoved, “I don’t see what I could have to do with it. Neither the Wolfsbane potion nor my thesis is complete, and the convention’s roster is. Besides, between Narcissa’s baby and Regulus’s anxieties,” which was to say, _because of doing as-yet uncompensated favors for Blacks,_ and that wouldn’t be lost on Slughorn, “I suspect I’ve more than used up my quota of personal days for the summer.”

And took his place at the cauldron back, utterly indifferent. And raveningly curious to see what Slughorn’s next move would be. Evan had explained this to him years ago: when there are roadblocks you can’t get past, if someone else wants you farther down the road for their own reasons, removing the obstacles is not a favor they are doing for _you_ , Spike.

“Now, now,” Slughorn waved a pudgy finger at him. One of these days he was going to bite that thing off, see if he didn’t. “You’re overstating it a bit, Severus, aren’t you? Belby tells me that even if you lot here aren’t satisfied with the potion, it does what it’s meant to well enough that the Ministry’s happy with it, isn’t that right?”

“THE MINISTRY HAS ITS HEAD UP ITS ARSE!” he howled, helplessly knee-jerk. Figuring he might as well be Kissed for a basilisk as a wyvern (and he couldn’t have stopped himself anyway; the Slug’s twenty-odd stone had right well set up camp on one of his most hair-trigger buttons), he stormed on, “QUITE ASIDE from the fact that AS YOU CAN SEE this damned thing takes ALL SODDING MORNING to brew ONE BATCH of it and you CAN’T PRESERVE IT and you can only make so much at one time and THEY HAVE TO TAKE IT EVERY DAY THE WEEK OF THE FULL!!”

Slughorn dodged the emphatic sweep of his jade stirring stick with what Severus might ( _might_ ) later acknowledge was unexpected agility for a wizard of that age and weight. “I can see it’s tedious to brew,” he offered soothingly.

“YOU LOOK AT THAT!” Severus shouted, and pointed with the stirring stick (and what he would later acknowledge, curled up on Evan’s shoulder in belated humiliation which he would decline to explain, to have been unnecessary dramatic flair) at the stillroom book. “SECOND PAGE!”

He hurled ingredients into the cauldron with unnecessary-but-not-problematic force and clockwork precision while Slughorn read down the page he’d indicated, the one with the list of the current formulation’s known side effects. There was some concerned tsking.

At this point, the footsteps outside finished their rapid but reluctant approach, and Ranjit Patil very unwillingly stuck his head into the lab. “Everything all right, Snape?” he asked, full of dread. “Hullo, Professor.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Pat—”

“MUTATING SILVER-ALLOY ALLERGIES!” Severus shrieked, flinging a hand out in furious appeal to Pat, Irony, and any gods, saints, or dead wizards that were inclined to look kindly on underdogs (underwolves?) or hapless craftsmen, fully aware he was wild-eyed as a blown horse and unable to do anything about it.

“Yes, they’re a problem,” Pat agreed, and wisely fled.

“Oh, dear GOD,” Severus added, in what was actually a far more reasonable tone of voice, if only comparatively, “are you making _tea_ in my stillroom?!”

“I do think you could use a cup, Severus, don’t you?” Slughorn asked mildly.

Severus made a miserable _aargh_ noise, but took the cup when it was pressed on him. He was going to have to scrub out the #2 copper cauldron with alcohol and distilled water later even before the sterilizing spell, because _tannins were insidious,_ but he couldn’t argue. At least Slughorn hadn’t found any sugar to shovel in. Because that was how he added it. Not in spoonfuls. With shovels. Not even garden trowels, but the sort muggles used for snow removal and undertaking.

(Evan called them Just Soup Spoons, Sturm Und Drang, No One’s Making You Drink It, but Severus felt that such dire offenses against tea deserved enough extravagance to draw attention to them. You couldn’t expect Evan to understand that. He could taste when tea had gone wrong, but he couldn’t be relied on not to boil the water or use cream. He thought tea bags were convenient and tea balls were brilliant, and had had the gall to act _confused_ when Severus had screamed in horror and banned him from the kitchen. It was just possible that this _had not been an act,_ although Severus was trying not to admit this to himself. If Evan could decide not to mind Severus’s face or entire personality, god knew why, Severus could overlook a few minor blasphemies.)

“Now, Severus,” Slughorn began in the special I’m-being-jovial-and-sensible voice Severus heard so much of that infallibly made him want to reach down people’s throats to yank their lungs out their mouths.

Mostly because it was _amazingly_ hard to argue with. Dumbledore’s who-me-snide courtesy was practically candy, it was so much fun. He knew he was being a prick and was delighted when you pricked back, and if you remembered it was a game you didn’t lose—no one lost—so that was all right. People who used _this_ voice generally believed themselves, or at least were highly invested in you behaving as though you believed them. As Evan would have said, yeurgh.

“I quite see why you’re frustrated with the potion,” his old teacher went on soothingly ( _ha!_ ), “but what has it got to do with the Ministry?”

“Because they think the project’s a success as is,” Severus hissed like the teakettle Slughorn hadn’t used (and what if it hadn’t been sterilized properly?! Of course Severus _had,_ but what if he hadn’t been the one to use it last, or, or… had developed bad habits since Slughorn had last seen him?), but did manage not to wave his cup around. “You look at that thing,” he indicated the stillroom book, “and consider what I just told you about having to brew it _ahahaha-‘just’_ seven times a month _if_ you can make the first batch of the day big enough for your purposes. Look at the ingredients on the workbench. Done your cost analysis? Good. Now do a cost- _benefit_ analysis from the Ministry’s point of view, balancing that amount for every, oh, ten werewolves or so against public sentiment regarding werewolves.”

“…Hm,” Slughorn agreed, frowning.

“Exactly. Now do a cost-benefit analysis from a brewer’s point of view, balancing time and materials against what most werewolves are likely to be able to pay if the government doesn’t fund distribution. Note while calculating time that you absolutely cannot work actively on any other potion while working on this one; it’s a ball-and-chainer at nearly every stage, and the simmer and automatic-stir periods aren’t long enough to do more than make a cuppa or, more likely, prepare more of ingredients you used more of than you expected to because it wasn’t acting right at that stage at that dosage and you’ll need to put in more of the same later. But you generally need a second pair of hands anyway.”

Nearly as quick at metallic arithmetic as Lucius, Slughorn nodded, “I see your point,” after only a moment’s calculation.

“Right,” Severus confirmed crisply. “Viable neither commercially nor as a Ministry program. _Potentially_ possible for some if the Ministry subsidized part of the cost, but unless werewolves become a great deal more employable quickly, only in theory built on highly unstable castles on unusually thin air. And that’s only my first point.”

“Of course it is,” Slughorn murmured in mixed exasperation and fondness, both soggy with nostalgia. False nostalgia, too, because Severus had it on good authority that no one was ever fond of anything he wrote while they were reading it. Even when he was using his clearest handwriting and not calling them names and making a real effort not to use words of more than three syllables more than twenty times a foot.

“The other one is, let’s assume it does miraculously become financially practicable. The side effects… they build, and some of them are permanent, or at least long-lasting. Including the personality changes. Which means that apart from all the physical difficulties, they’d be left with a choice of going monstrously mad one night a month, when everyone expected it and they were able to make themselves secure, or going mad to an unknowable degree for the rest of their lives, all the time or sporadically, no way to predict it. And if not mad, not themselves. Maybe never themselves again. I know which _I’d_ pick.”

“Madam Pomfrey’s complained to me of your pain tolerance,” Slughorn noted in an _I’m just saying_ voice.

“I wasn’t born with it,” snapped Severus, shoulders hunching defensively. “One adapts. But whether everyone would make the same choice I would or not, not everyone would make the other.”

He looked drillingly at his old teacher, waiting for an argument. Slughorn just waited for him to go on.

“So… you know the Ministry. Am I wrong to think they’d either drop the project or make it illegal not to take the stuff if they didn’t get swarmed with requests? To think that any werewolf who didn’t take it when it was available would be facing bad, bad consequences?”

“Possibly not,” Slughorn admitted.

“And what do you think the packs who were already angry enough to give up on the idea of being Wizarding-British do then,” he asked, very softly. “The ones who resent the way we treat them already. When they see the ones who try to cooperate dulled and crippled and made even _less._ Forced to it. Or hope snatched away. Either way. What do they think of us then, Professor? What do they do about it?”

“You should take up telling ghost stories for a living, m’boy,” Slughorn chuckled uneasily.

“Mm.” Severus let his face, gaze fixed on a future he _did not want_ , fall into what he suspected was one of its more unnerving little smiles. “That is what it would be, in the end, wouldn’t it?”

Slughorn spooked hard enough to slop tea over his hand, and put his cup down firmly. “Then raising awareness sounds like quite a good thing, don’t you think? The pressure of international public opinion never did any project any harm.” He stopped to think about it.

“…That wasn’t terrible,” Severus supplied helpfully.

“Any project that wasn’t terrible,” Slughorn agreed. “Come, now. I can make it right with Damocles, and the convention roster’s no trouble. Someone’s always dropping out of these things. Say you will.”

Severus hesitated. His old Housemaster was absolutely right, as far as he could see (no surprise; Slughorn usually was, about politics), although he was probably lying to the anti-charity-case about the roster. Britain was one of the most xenophobic European wizarding communities, Evan said. An excited question or two from one of the countries that was less invested in clinging by its fingernails to an outmoded caste system could only help him. Especially since those countries tended to be the plusher and more powerful ones.

Besides, he could use a few days away from his schedule. It would give him some time to look into Reggie’s thing. Quite possibly without even having to dodge Potter, if he arranged matters carefully.

But he couldn’t just go ahead and say yes, certainly he’d spend a week out of town, why not. The Dark Lord would eat his face.

Anyway, he wouldn’tjust say yes to what was turning into a mission of persuasion until he was assured that Belby wasn’t a better choice for it and didn’t want to do it himself. And that Evan and/or Narcissa were going to be able to write him a guideline-script. Because damned if he knew how to even start with something like this.

Finally, he said, “I’ll think about it. If Master Belby tells me yes, as well as you, I’ll think about it.” If he was allowed, no consideration would be needed. But the cover for asking permission served him well, left him looking reluctant, left Slughorn under no impression that Severus would come out of this in even social debt.

“I won’t say that’s all I can ask,” Slughorn beamed broadly, his pale eyes twinkling as his fleshy cheeks bunched. “But it’ll do for a start.” He had enough sense not to underline how little time there was in which to decide. Severus could read, and the pressing deadline was Slughorn’s own fault for asking him so close to it.

“Oh, Salazar’s sake,” Severus said irritably, turning all the way back to the cauldron he’d been absently stirring, “don’t _smile_ like that, it makes you look like Professor Dumbledore.”

“A compliment if ever there was one!” the irritant beamed even wider, and floated off like a technically-but-not-contextually small plum-colored cloud.

“I’ll have to work harder, then,” Severus muttered sourly into his cauldron, and reached with a sigh for the aconite.

He always wanted Evan horribly every time he spent too long with Slughorn, wanted him in the leaden hollows of his chest and the aching of his finger bones, in the offended solitude of his palms and face and ankles where an Evan should have been carelessly wound around him, in the unguarded prickling between his shoulderblades. He wanted to owl him right now, to write, _Spent the morning with a quiet nightmare I will never, never let happen to you._

But he knew what Evan meant with all his It Doesn’t Work When You Do It Out Louds. Some enemies you had to hit in the face repeatedly until they decided you weren’t worth it and sauntered away. Some of them you had to lay silent siege to, shun, starve out.

What Evan turned into on his own—what he’d been when Severus had met him—that cold, apathetic, polite _pureblood_ , drifting and disengaged and (in the eleven-year-old Severus’s opinion) barely human… It was intolerable and not allowed. And what you did about it was…

…Was whatever his very strange brain did on its own when Severus was around; Severus wasn’t actually at all clear on that bit. But they didn’t talk about it, because there wasn’t anything to talk about. Not because it wasn’t worth talking about, but because it was an absence rather than a thing. He just got bored, or… or, or something. Cooled off and… drifted.

It had been _very upsetting_ every September and January. Even though Severus was always lead-eyed from taking the overnight train south to King’s Cross to meet the northbound express (it was an outstandingly stupid system, in his opinion; he didn’t see why Northerners and Scots who wanted to couldn’t come up the night before to spend the night at the Three Broomsticks and meet Hagrid in the morning, if the Hogsmeade station was so panicky about security. It wasn’t as if everyone met everyone on the damned train; even firsties sorted themselves into compartments, not as randomly as most of the adults fondly and brainlessly imagined, and mostly stayed there) or otherwise not feeling well in the autumns.

There was nothing like seeing one’s best friend with the vacantly smiling eyes of a porcelain doll from a horror movie where fond _you’re hopeless_ laughter should have been to make one feel one’s summer hadn’t been all _that_ bad. Bones were just bones.

People had said Severus looked like a vampire in his school robes, but Evan had _felt_ like one after holidays. His body was body-temperature, perfectly normal to the touch, but you couldn’t quite believe it, looking at him. He radiated chill, worse than people did when they were trying to explain with their expressions how deeply they held you in contempt. Severus had been prepared to despise, abhor, and potentially destroy himself trying to rip Evan’s parents’ throats out for that.

But once they’d all spent some time in the same room together and Evan’s parents had seen that the zombie started thawing into _Ev_ more or less the moment Severus started flailing and snarking at him—that their placid, charming, flat-eyed model child smiled and groaned like a human person and smacked and hauled Severus around like any boy would do with a friend—it had become very clear very quickly that they’d been at their wits’ end for years.

In the end, Severus had in fact had to take his life in his hands and shout at them before they’d stop offering him money (stupid, _stupid_ money; even now he couldn’t think about it without the part of him that was never getting out of Spinner’s Row kicking him, quite aside from having had to sit down with his arms over his ears and hyperventilate afterwards over bellowing at House Black-Rosier) to live with Evan, almost as a job. As if he were some parasoled lady’s devoted companion from out of Lily’s Austen novels (only better armed (and snarlier)).  _Toffs_.

The only reason he hadn’t hexed them was because they had, despite offending him in very nearly every other possible way, managed not to suggest that they thought of him in gigolo terms. It had only been the roofs they were trying to manage, not the beds. In fact, Ev’s mother had still been nearly-subtly trying to convince him to date other, wealthier, purer, more easily manipulated people with more reliable diction and no embarrassing inclinations towards manual labor or making important people feel insulted.

Evan’s mother simply didn’t care about Severus’s feelings (he could respect that), but Mr. Rosier might not even have noticed. It was hard to say. As far as Severus could tell, he was as bland as Evan looked, only caring about even art and the pureblood agenda because his father and wife and old school-chum Voldemort cared and why not, you had to do something with yourself, didn’t you?

Severus saw what that self-same tepid ghoul lurking in wait inside his friend could grow into every time he saw Slughorn. Amiable, facile, manipulative as all hell, less than terrifying only because of the complete lack of energy, imagination, or personal ambition.

It made him ache to be pinned, warm, blue eyes in his and strong, warm hands cupping his face, rocked slow and heavy and safe. To feel in every part of him, mouth and marrow, blood and spine, right down to his fingertips and the tops of his feet, that Evan was there, _really_ there, awake and focused and able to care about things. Doing so.

If he were selfish, he could have that. But he wanted (he always did, after he’d been talking to the Slug for a while) to promise Evan, _make sure he knew_ that Severus would _never let that happen to him_. And he couldn’t do that with safe. Safe was what they did when he deserved something or needed a lift, not when Evan did.

No Greeks tonight. Or different Greeks. Aristotle, even, if he really needed to be riled up; Severus had been saving _spontaneous generation_ to hit him with on a really special occasion. This might not be a calendar-occasion, but it felt right. They’d be arguing miracle versus transfiguration versus just plain wrong until _three,_ until he thought he was too exhausted for anything, and then Severus would take him apart. He’d cram all the feelings and ideas the world had ever had into that blandly blithe don’t-know-what-I’m-missing until the moron who’d punched him because he’d spent his life too hollow to know the difference between passionate terror and being hacked off was never defeated by his own storms or emptiness again.

As he added handfuls (not pinches, with a batch this big) of this and that prepared ingredient, and adjusted the temperature, and stirred, and stirred, and stirred, Severus thought about his shopping list. He could just see what looked good at the fish market and work from there, pick up some limes and decide between the herbs and spices once he had a fish… or some prawns, do something spicy and Spanish with them. He wanted Ev remembering he’d been raised all over Europe while they talked about the conference, wanted him thinking internationally.

Some peaches and fresh basil to make a sangria of the wine, maybe, depending on what he came out of the fish market with. Or a limeade would be just as easy and quicker, and he’d still want basil for that. Maybe a dash of elf-wine vinegar, for that extra bite and complexity.

And a quite large stick of sealing wax, and one of those little spoons for it. Blue would make Evan feel shown off to advantage, or maybe turquoise. He did like to preen about how the Prince colors set him off, the red bringing out the sun and fire in his hair, the blue turning his eyes even brighter and nearly green. Severus liked to call him a peacock, but only because if they pretended it was about vanity it was possible to talk about it, in public, even, without other people knowing he was clinging to Ev’s silly, soppy drivel like a stuffed bear.

Also because Ev had that _thing_ about the Malfoy birds he wasn’t as over as he liked to pretend he was. Severus was a very helpful person.

It wasn’t his fault sweetening potions usually ruined or changed them.

…Did they do sealing wax in smells, or was it just candles? He could improvise, if not. God knew Evan had enough essential oils, to ‘create moods’ for Ev’s clients and put in the bath. There had to be dozens if not hundreds in that wizarding-space cabinet in the bathroom. Ev had even made most of them himself and for his own use, so he’d probably like whatever Severus decided he could stand (Ev was quite good at making scents by now. So good that opening some of the undiluted vials was like being punched in the nose by a fistful of highly aggressive herbs that had been sucking up a Strengthening Solution).

And maybe he could find a few yards of lace ribbon, not so nice that he’d feel badly about (de)spoiling the craftsmanship, quite broad and preferably on the scratchy side. Or nice would be all right if they could tell him how to clean it without having an elf or ruining it. Black, if possible, finding blue being unlikely, but he could fix that, himself, too, if necessary. Anything else Ev might turn out to not know he’d been wanting they could rig up at home.

The cauldron wanted more aconite. This time, the dried and pounded kind. It was nice having Phil Lovegood’s spouse on staff so they didn’t have to go out and pick the stuff under a dark moon themselves. And almost no one believed that sort of thing mattered these days, so you couldn’t get an honest supplier for love-of-the-craft or money. But Phil would believe _any_ damned thing, as long as no one else did, and he could make time for her.

 _Three, two, one, sprinkle generously_. _Deosil two three lapdog fur two three fur… and three and four… and twelve. Flame to 1200°C, commence semi-vertical stirring deosil._  Two more hours to go. …But, ha! Slughorn was gone now!

He turned the soundproofing spell and the music back on.

_What happened to our innocence_  
 _Did it go out of style?_  
 _Along with our naïveté_  
 _No longer a child_  
 _Different eyes see different things…_

Er. “Next.”

_…The most endangered species_  
 _The honest man_  
 _Will still survive annihilation_  
 _Forming a world_  
 _State of integrity_  
 _Sensitive, open and strong_

…Right, so he was clearly going to have to never listen to this album again. And possibly shatter the music ball and obliviate himself. It was his own fault for picking up something Mam had ‘happened to mention’ that Da had grunted at her that he ought to listen to since it had come out around his birthday. Translation: ‘the boy and I don’t get each other presents any more and he’ll like it.’

Which wasn’t _entirely 100%_ wrong _,_ just _disastrous. Just_ like Da. He was even better at getting Severus in trouble than Severus, Potter, Black, and Pettigrew were (Lupin was the weak, enabling, bending with the current sort of evil; he didn’t start trouble himself) all put together: Da could do it from 240 miles away without getting off the couch. Maybe the other songs would be all right?

_There are those who think_  
 _That they were dealt a losing hand_  
 _The cards were stacked against them_  
 _They weren't born in Lotusland_  
  
 _All preordained_  
 _A prisoner in chains_  
 _A victim of venomous fate_  
 _Kicked in the face_  
 _You can't pray for a place_  
 _In heaven's unearthly estate_

_You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice_  
 _If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice._  
 _You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill_  
 _I will choose a path that's clear_  
 _I will choose freewill!_

Charming. _This,_ before he had to go ask the Dark Lord for time away! By all means, let’s not think of pink elephants.

 _Fine_. He hadn’t been in an O-Fortuna-and-Beethoven-on-steel-and-glass mood before (the Flailing Fwoopers were vastly and unsurprisingly underappreciated), but now everyone was going to have to fucking live with it.

* * *

[[1]](https://www.fanfiction.net/docs/edit.php?docid=40390498#_ftnref1) This was because both of these plays, while horrifying rather than funny to anyone with the tiniest scrap of a postmodern or even modern social conscience, were officially comedies. Therefore anyone who pulled a line from there in desperation or by accident could nearly-legitimately contest a foul. One won one of these squabbles by being the one Petty—er, Petunia chucked a book or bottle of nail varnish at. The randomness and complete merit-deficiency of this system had ensured no hard feelings. Theoretically. In practice, Severus usually won, which Lily at least pretended to find irritating, and when he didn’t, winning didn’t make her feel better about it. Severus occasionally wanted to tell her that he didn’t know what she was sulking about: Petty’s books were fluffy in both content and composition and the bottles were quite small and light and didn’t smash dangerously jagged when employed offensively. However, he not only had more sense than that but didn’t want to go where that conversation would end up.


	53. Dye Urn Alley, Concurrently

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's difficult to know how to react to finding one's least favorite couple in the universe having a punch-up on one's porch. Evan is sure he will be up to the challenge. ^_^

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : Red and green very seldom work well together.

Wandering home, Evan patted the receipt in his pocket. He was frankly relieved to be finished with the Tunisian ambassador’s cousin’s portrait. It wasn’t just the gingivitis; the witch had been very hard to keep both happy and at arm’s length. Wine-and-dining her in ridiculous places on the ambassador’s knut had been more trial than compensation.

Not just because she was a single-minded matrimony-barracuda who wouldn’t take an _I’m-not-on-the-market_ hint, either. She didn’t know _anything_. She didn’t even have the sort of information that would have given him leads about who else in her circle to approach, probably because bad breath did not make for a popular gossip. It had been a complete waste of time.

Rose and Yew Inc. had gotten the order for an exceedingly fancy frame out of the ambassador, though. Now, the painting was up to Evan’s standards and he was satisfied with it, but it didn’t rate a frame like that. Since frames were where most of the profit came from, being quick relatively quick transfiguration jobs, and the canny knew it, they’d most likely gotten that order because the ambassador knew what his cousin was like and appreciated the babysitting.

Either way, Grandpère was pleased. He was so pleased that Evan had decided he’d earned an Evening. This meant a nap before Spike got back from work, since the portrait had been using morning light, _ugh._ He hated it when they thought they knew about painting. As if Evan—or any portraitist Grandpère would even consider using—wasn’t perfectly competent with lighting charms. Idiot.

Well, he was finished with her now. And there was plenty of time to go out and chat up the marketplace while looking for a pudding frilly enough to make Spike’s jaw drop in _why do people bother_ and gooey enough to make deconstructing it _fun_ and interesting enough that even Spike would eventually nearly-understand why it was worth the bother, even with his sad lack of sweet tooth. Eventually. Once properly demonstrated. Speaking of teeth.

…And maybe even time to wander about until he’d found a bottle of something to match it. Maybe have the things owled so he could pretend he hadn’t found them and wander-and-chat more.

Let Lucius and Narcissa get all their information in withdrawing rooms and the halls of the Ministry and Bella pull tonsils: Evan kept the pulse of the middle class without getting his hands mucky.

He’d pulled a few galleons when he’d deposited his commission expressly for celebrating, because it was just more satisfying that way. He’d keep a knut from the change, too, flatten it to cameo-size, and paint the ambassador on one side and the cousin on the other, wrapped in the receipt, for his trophy box.

After all, coin-cameos were more hygienic spoils of war (or something) than house-elf heads in the hall.

Or Great-great-uncle Arcturus’s collection of gilded squib tonkers, with which Granddad (named for the bastard, poor man; Reggie had a much better namesake in Granddad) and his brothers had apparently been encouraged to play conkers until their mother found out. Aunt Walburga and Uncle Cygnus’s branch of the family was er-odd. Siri and even Bella were angels in comparison to some of that lot. As Black trophies went, Ev’s cameos were _nothing_.

Besides, as long as he didn’t make enemies of their subjects (and making enemies wasn’t his game), if they predeceased him the portraits might turn out to be useful, you never knew.

So he was whistling in perfect cheer as he ambled around the corner of Diagon and Dye Urn.

He reflected, mouth still pursed around the last note, that he really ought to have known better.

Not that he hadn’t made a conscious decision to leave pessimism and cynicism and expecting rain on his every parade to Spike, because he had. Only, things never did go all well all at once, so he ought to have expected balance.

Although, in fairness to himself (and, unlike Spike, he did prefer to be fair to himself), he didn’t think there had been any reason to expect to come home to find James Potter not only visible for once but having a domestic with his wife on Evan’s porch.

He cast a very mild attention deflector, what Spike liked to call a someone-else’s-problem charm, and went to lean up against his bannister, listening with shameless interest. It was _his_ porch, after all.

Sadly, they hadn’t gotten past the What Are You Doing Here, Excuse ME What Are YOU Doing Here, How Do You Even Know This Address, How Do I Well How Do YOU stage. At first Evan thought this was because he’d come in right at the beginning, but after a while he realized it was entirely possible he’d come in at hour two and might stand there watching the Punch and Judy show (sans punching, at least) for another hour before they got anywhere.

He dropped the charm and cleared his throat gently. Potter jumped like the Seeker he’d been and Evans—Lily—wheeled around in ungainly alarm. “Hullo,” he greeted them brightly. He had a moment’s impulse to offer E—Lily an out like _Looking for Sue?_ Sadly for her, she hadn’t come close to earning that sort of mercy from him. So he just went on looking at them in lazily sprightly inquiry, if you could have that.

He tried to keep the sadistic enjoyment off his face as the silence stretched awkwardly. _Tried so hard_. Narcissa would have been proud of him.

“Wrong address. We’ll just be going,” Potter said stiffly.

“But how could you possibly have gotten the wrong address?” Evan asked, widening his eyes. “I mean, you’ve been here practically every morning and evening for oooh, _years,_ coz.”

There was a confused outburst (they weren’t confused; the noise was confused. They were outraged and appalled) of _I don’t know what you’re talking about!_ and _what do you mean he’s been here every day?!_ and _I’m NOT your cousin!_

“Oh, really,” Evan sighed, buffing his nails in a pure-Lucius move with a pained look. “Don’t you know that when Siri’s parents cut him off when he moved in with you, instead of charging your parents with kidnapping, it was only because your mum’s a Black? My sweet Aunt Off-the-Wall would have _loved_ to punish whoever tried to harbor him, haul him back by the hair, and lock him in his room for brainwashing again. She just wasn’t going to start a civil war. Of course you’re my cousin. We needn’t pop champagne corks over it, but facts,” he spread his hands helplessly, “are facts.”

Potter glared.

Evans repeated, with an anxiety like gathering stormclouds, “What do you mean he’s been here every day?”

Ev stared at her. He parted his lips, squinted at her, started to say something, stopped, looked between them. His mouth quirked, and he asked in very-nearly-genuine disbelief, “You didn’t—you did! Did you _actually believe_ he’d stopped stalking Severus? _Evans!_ ” By this point he was overtly laughing at her, delighted. _Gryffs!_

She turned ominously, Potter started to bluster, it was all sublime.

Evan couldn’t let it turn into a rumpus in the street, though. Too many politicians and reporters lived on Dye Urn, and sometimes came home for lunch at odd hours.

“Come off it, Potter,” he therefore cut the bluster off airily. “Of course I can prove it. I’ve got _far_ more friends in the Ministry than you do, and the chappies in Records knew more than enough about what went on at Hogwarts to understand exactly why I’d want to be told when any of your friends looked up Severus’s address. We’ve got wards on the street that alert us when you show up on it, and log an entry in a record-book—which isn’t kept here, of course—and I make Severus take a pensieve memory whenever you harass him at work. Don’t be silly.”

They stared at him with identical kicked-sheep expressions. Which he was unquestionably sketching later. Maybe pastels, or a watercolor. If it had just been Potter, then ink, but you couldn’t do Evans properly in black and white.

“Slytherin,” he reminded them gently, with a whimsical, head-tilted smile.

“And obviously lying! Really really obviously! You can’t put wards on the _street!_ ” Potter sputtered.

He let his smile turn curly. “I’m a Black, Potter. Not surname, no, but still, I’m not just bloodline, I’m _Tapestry._ And raised to it. You ask your mum if I can’t.”

Evans eyed him. “Are you saying,” she asked cautiously, sounding so much like Spike-from-third-year that he wanted to grin, “being a Black lets you do it even though you shouldn’t be allowed to, or lets you know how to do it even though nobody else would?”

“Now, why couldn’t you have asked good questions like that at school?” he asked her, aggrieved. “It would have saved us all _so_ much trouble. The second. There’s nothing illegal about a spell used in a public area that doesn’t hurt anyone, isn’t a catch-all net, and is meant only for self-protection. Not having been used against the one it’s keyed to for two years straight makes a pretty good case that it never was meant to be used for harm, don’t you think? Or don’t think: you’ve got Auror friends, ask them. But you’re not wrong about what being part of a Noble House is good for. I _told_ you Severus spent all of Hogwarts in a spot.”

“Two _years?!_ ” Evans demanded, wheeling on her husband again. Ev leaned happily back against the balcony and admired the killing-curse color of the sparks in her eyes. She really was very pretty. The sun was fantastic on such dark red hair, too. The gold highlights made it almost comically Gryff.

Only almost, though; she was saved by wearing a knee-length dress of some heavy, stiff material of a soft blue color, not Houselike at all. Ev mixed paints speculatively in his head. You’d want a dry brush for that blue stuff, he thought; it had a pronounced, tough-looking texture for all the washed-out color suggested softness. Or pastel or watercolor on a textured paper might be best, if it was an informal work for which going collage was all right.

“He’s lying!” Potter tried again. It was a little too aggressive, but Evan was interested to note that he was a much better liar than Severus was. It only made sense, he supposed; Potter had made a lot more trouble than Severus had, but _gotten_ in far less. Spike was generally happy just knowing a new spell, he didn’t need to go prove it to everyone. Therefore, all his trouble had been unplanned, and not specifically-prepared-for-with-planned-exits. Not so the Gryffindor thugs. “He’ll have rigged some book to frame me, probably have one for the lads, too…”

“…That’s what you’d do? Nope,” Evan yawned, enjoying himself. “Really, Potter, can’t you do better than that? She’ll be able to find out who Pettigrew asked for the address and ask that person whether they told me—look, I won’t even steer your investigation—and I know you know plenty of cursebreakers who can take a look at the wards, tell you what they do and how long they’ve been there. Get Flitwick down and he can probably even tell you whose magical fingerprints are on them. I bet he’d do it for Evans, he likes her. And I’ll grant a log-book might be possible to fake, but not pensieve memories. That’s never convincing. Here,” he said cheerfully to Evans, “you tell me if this sounds familiar.”

She turned back to him, in a horrified dread that showed she was starting to really get to _know_ him. Maybe someday they’d be friends! That would make Spike happy. He beamed at the thought. She recoiled instinctively, which of course only made him beam more sunnily.

He leaned forward confidingly, and asked, “I don’t suppose you remember, hmm, a month or so ago, I think it was, you passed him, I supposed it must have been in the hospital but maybe it was just on the street, he didn’t say. And, oh, let me guess, you thought, _Oh, there’s Sev! He’s looking well! I wish we could still be friends, I miss my friend, only he’s EVIL, it’s such a SHAME._ Something like that, yes?”

And she did look ashamed for a flicker of a moment, but then she stuck out her chin and met his eyes squarely and said, with emphasis, “Yes, that’s what I _thought_.”

Potter started, hearing exactly what Evan heard. He didn’t like it.

Evan did, and let his eyes on her warm. He even let his shoulders drop a bit, becoming aware of how much his neck had started to ache. He didn’t let her off the hook entirely, or take his eyes off her, but he refocused his attention onto Potter, using his peripheral vision. “Well,” he said more comfortably, “he came home and he was in a MOOD, you know the one.”

She nodded, with the long-suffering look of someone who was indeed intimately familiar with what Slytherin called a Sodding Snape MoodTM.

“And Reggie came over and,” he laugh-sighed, “poor Reggie, he’s a sweet kid, but you know, it’s his mum, he thinks the way you make people feel better is ask if they want to hurt someone. Well,” he smiled broadly at Potter, or at least showed some teeth, “not _just_ because of his mum.”

Of course, what Reggie really thought made people feel better was asking if they wanted someone _to be hurt for them_ , but that wasn’t the sort of thing you told people. They might understand.

Evans had stepped in front of Potter. She was enough shorter than him that he didn’t seem to have noticed.

“Sweet,” Evan noted, “but not necessary. And I’m sure the knight in sanguine armor you’re protecting would say so, too.” Then he let them fuss over each other and squawk about chivalry and the pre-baby for a little bit until he was bored, at which point he cheerfully caroled, “ _As I was saying!_ ”

They turned back to him with a mix of irritation and suspicion and he only just managed to roll his eyes. They ought to decide whether he was a possible threat or not. They also ought to have called Sirius in about ten minutes ago, either way. Just because Potter could more or less wrangle Siri didn’t mean he was adept in generalized Black-handling. Severus would never have made that mistake, and he could have dinner with the Lestranges without actually being killed.

But it wasn’t a surprise that Gryffindors weren’t taught Appropriate Delegation by their Head or prefects. He didn’t know what they were taught, really. Maybe that backing down was impossibly shameful even after you’d realized you were wrong.

“I was _saying,_ ” he repeated mildly, “that Reg came to visit and Severus was in a mood, so he had to be told, and he wanted to know didn’t Severus want to make you suffer, Evans. And Severus said,” he cleared his throat, “let me see. He said you _would_ suffer, because—”

He did his best to drop an octave, and recalled, “‘She’s got to _live_ with the lying so-and so, and sooner or later she’ll realize what she’s got. And then he’ll find out one or two things about who _she_ is, when she thinks you’ve Let Her Down.’”

They both flinched, she looked defensive, he looked Bravely Apprehensive, it was lovely.

Evan went on, in his own voice. “And then he speculated that you’d probably go for a natural birth, because Gryffs are strange about pain and have very odd ideas about things being cowardly when they’re just sensible—I barely paraphrase, sorry—but erm, Narcissa broke Lucius’s hand and she _was_ on pain numbing charms, so I don’t recommend it,” he told Lily candidly.

She set her jaw, but not in an _I’m going to be stupid anyway_ sort of way, and said, “No fear. I’m not going to a magic castle with unicorns in the forest for school and then _not having painkillers_ when I go into labor.”

He nodded. Severus would be relieved, really. He was dangerous if you surprised him and he had a finely honed sense of justice that occasionally overwhelmed his common sense (see: The Spider Incident)[1], but Evan had never once caught him following through on one of those nasty little revenge fantasies that had kept Mulciber and Avery enthralled. He’d brood over and refine them until he had a sympathetic audience, but crooning them out had always seemed to lance the boil. At least, it did as long as no one then compounded the problem by treating him like a monster.

He’d tried writing them down, instead, at Narcissa’s suggestion, but it didn’t have the same effect. Spike, Ev thought, however stubbornly he’d stayed offstage so no one would associate the choir with him and shun everyone else in it, was a performer in his bones. He might argue with existing text, with relish and earnestness and even dark glee, but a blank page no one would see when he’d filled it gave him exactly no satisfaction.

“And then he said,” he dropped low again, and did his best to imitate the frankly psychotic little smile Spike had been wearing at that point, which Evan hadn’t begrudged him. “I have a pensieve. He will keep on stalking me. Playing his little tricks. And she thinks she has him thoroughly reformed. If she takes _too_ long to suss him on her own…”

He did his best attempt at one of Spike’s gracefully shrugging hand gestures, too, although his hands were really too broad to carry it off properly. To do the thing right you _needed_ long, white, tapering poet’s hands like Spike’s. Well, he supposed they didn’t have to be pale, necessarily. As long as they were dramatic and slender and didn’t knock anything over in the process. If they were at least as dark as Ranjit’s also-long flambéed-caramelly ones, that worked, too, but Evan’s unexceptionally tan, square fingers were just all wrong for it, in his own opinion.

He grinned at her, eyes crinkling. “Now, honestly, Evans. Granted that I’ve been living with him a long time, but do you think _anyone_ can put words in Severus’s mouth for him? He’s _sui generis_ and loony. Beautifully loony,” he reflected dreamily, mostly to make Potter gag so Evans would glare at him in offended my-husband-should-be-more-romantic, HA, WIN, “but _definitely loony._ Cannot be anticipated, replicated, or forged. That mold has been in teeny, tiny, cranky splinters since he came out of it. Eighteenth century novels don’t talk like that man.”

She was about to smile back at him, because he was right and she knew it (and they both actually quite liked those cranky splinters, and it was nice to be sure they both did, which Evan hadn’t been until recently, and she probably hadn’t been sure of her own liking either), and then her eyes flickered and she was horrified again. Slowly, she said, “I think he didn’t quite realize he was telling you how to hurt us, and you’re doing it because you know he won’t.”

“He is awfully squeamish for a brewer,” Evan allowed judiciously, with a shuttered smile that admitted nothing, “but all I have is the truth. And I’ve had no answers from either of you. _Wrong address,_ ” he repeated with a dismissive little chuckle, giving Potter a scornful once-over before turning his gaze back to Evans. “I suppose you do have some business here you’d be willing to admit to, whether or not you’re ready for him,” he aimed a thumb at her husband, “to know about it yet?”

Potter started to look infuriated and probably shout something, and then, as planned, the ‘yet’ took him aback. He asked Lily, “Yet?”

She looked caught between gratitude for the reminder of the portrait, easy explanation for her possible visits, and resentment because she was onto him. “Yes, yet,” she told James. “Yes, you’re going to be told, and no, not today.” He looked suspicious, intrigued, mollified, and as if he was already planning a campaign to tease it out of her. Evan did not smirk, or have any expression at all besides continuing to look at Evans in expectation of an answer. “It’s not that,” she began.

A very tangled story ensued. It involved Lupin, something called spraypaint (which made Evan twitch on principle, because if it worked like it sounded…!), the dreadful little park she and Spike had skulked around as children, Sirius, and Lupin’s lease.

The end of it was that Evans had sent Severus an owl with find-me charm on to find out where an owl to him would go, and found out that he’d started having non-emergency owls re-routed to their block of flats’ owlery. Her intent had apparently been to steal a potentially upsetting photograph out of their mail because, being muggle-born and muggle-raised, she didn’t understand that she wasn’t going to be able to do that without setting off all kinds of mail-protection spells and probably getting arrested.

“Circe save us all,” Evan muttered, rubbing his eyes wearily while Potter caught at his wife in horror and started explaining in lurid detail exactly what could have happened to her.

(Ev had gotten even more fond of Circe, at least as someone to swear by, since they’d read through her part of the Greek story. Which was much more interesting than the one about the war, in his opinion. Although neither of them had been able to stomach the idea of bacon since then, and he was right at the point where he was still queasy about it but starting to miss it, which wasn’t delightful in the mornings before coffee.)

“All right, come on. Not you,” he added, cutting Potter off before the man could take more than a step, with a very cold smile. “You aren’t welcome in my home.”

He waited out the argument, not really caring whether Evans came in with him to get the photograph or not. Lupin had been a prefect with them for a year; he was sure he could still recognize the man’s handwriting and didn’t need her. She might have had another reason to come, though, and for Spike’s sake he’d even let her yell at him in private to find out what it was.

Evans won, of course, because she believed Ev and so Potter was in a bad, bad position with her. Although Evan didn’t delude himself for a moment that he’d so much as rocked them. She’d married him _after_ the beech tree, after all.

Still, he might be on the couch for a while, and she might even believe, in this moment, that she was angry enough to do something more drastic than that. Ev couldn’t think of anything Spike could do to anyone that would make Ev leave him. Not that Spike _could_ do, not Spike. He could probably be forced to do things that would make them both sick, but the answer to that was mutual obliviation, not separation. Never, while he was himself. And Evans had _married_ Potter. After the beech tree. Presumably she’d made that decision knowing who he was, in his heart.

Ick. It really made a person remember that Spike had been a hat-stall, the way he could forgive that about her.

Evan had been told he had deep untouched wells of potential he didn’t even know the names for yet, and Hufflepuff would do him good. At the time, however, he’d been making a note to himself to find out how hallway patrols and bed checks and things like that worked, so he could sneak past them and draw the Great Hall and outside views of the castle at night, with all the windows lit. So he hadn’t really been paying attention. In fact, it had taken him a moment after the Hat said _I stand corrected, definitely Slytherin,_ to remember he was supposed to be doing something and go sit next to Narcissa.

As the two of them walked down the hall to the little owlery, Evans commented evenly, if not lightly, as a Slytherin would have, “I think I would have preferred you to burn my hair off.”

Evan matched her tone. “You don’t have the _first idea_ what that—what your husband has put my Spike through. Do you not-have-the-first-idea on purpose?”

“ _No,_ ” she said angrily. “He swore he’d stopped.”

“The problem with people who’re positive there’s a Good Side and a Bad Side and they’re on the good one,” Evan said, regarding her soberly, “is that sometimes they think it gives them license to do bad things, because it can’t be bad really if it’s their side doing it to the Bad Side, and anyone who can’t see that is just unenlightened.”

“I suppose you’d know,” she snapped.

“And now you know,” he replied, unruffled.

They got as far as the mailboxes, and then she said in a small voice, “He _knows_ what I think about it.”

“Which is why he lied, I assume,” Evan returned, raising an eyebrow. “You’re stubborn, he’s obsessed, you’re both sure you’re right, so you tell each other what you want to hear and don’t really talk about it. _Capita inter nubilia, alterum non laedere._ ”

“…Tell me you didn’t just call me nubile when I feel as if I’ve got a watermelon up my jumper.”

Evan rolled his eyes. “I said, ‘heads stuffed in the clouds, to keep from hurting each other.”

“That’s… kind of you,” she said suspiciously.

“Yes, well, I was going to follow it with ‘clearly he’s learned not to tickle a sleeping dragon,’ or possibly ‘people generally believe what they want to, and you can’t have a useful argument with someone who denies the basic facts.’

She looked for a moment as if she was about to go hotheaded on him, and then eyed him shrewdly. “You’ve seen people not-argue like that before?”

“I usually spent summers with my parents,” he said, “but they stuck me with Sirius and Reggie for Christmas, as a rule. You know, it never occurred to Reg that Sirius might run away, and Siri thought for sure that Reggie would go with him.”

This of course wasn’t at all true. They’d both known perfectly well what the other one would do. But they’d also both done a quite good job of very-nearly convincing themselves otherwise.

Evan had been away with his parents that summer until Sirius had actually left, and the aftermath he’d come back to had been bad enough. He hadn’t envied Narcissa or Severus, who’d been trying to keep Regulus together until then (while Narcissa also played hard-to-get with a jaded Slytherin five years her senior and Severus tried to train himself out of panic attacks, learn dueling and how never to be ambushed again, hold down a full-time job, and impress Lucius’s father while living in his house).

She was silent while he put his palm up against his mailbox and tapped the lock with his wand. “Is this what you meant,” she asked, “when you said I shouldn’t trust you on my own account, but you wouldn’t be too awful because Sev wouldn’t want you to?”

He stared at her. “That’s not what I said,” he said. “I can’t believe he didn’t teach you not to rely on promises a Slytherin _didn’t actually make,_ I really _can’t believe it_ , I expect he did and you just weren’t listening. And I’ve _no idea_ how you got there just now. But I suppose it’s not too far wrong.”

“Well,” she said with her chin out, “it seems to me you just broke my marriage’s nose and then tried to teach me episkey.”

He considered this, letters in his hands. Finally he said, “I broke your marriage’s eight-foot-and-counting nose off to a reasonable length, because it kept smacking my Spike in the face, and then gave you sandpaper.” With a nod of satisfaction, he started to sort through the mail.

She looked startled. “Was that a Pinocchio reference?!”

He put his finger to his lips and winked. “Don’t tell Mulciber, will you? You’ll get Severus in trouble. Can’t say I cared for it, but I’d have read him drearier and more moralistic than that to get him to read me his History notes. Anyway, he didn’t make me finish that one. I thought it was pretty foul generally, but since we went to Cyrano de Bergerac after that and he’d tolerated sociopathic characters without redeeming features before,[2] I suspect it may have been the judging-a-book-by-its-proboscis bit getting to him.  You should hear him do the ‘thousand things varying the tone’ speech… Ah, here we are.” He stopped shuffling at Lupin’s envelope. “How nasty are the hexes, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t have thought there’d be any,” she said, grouchily disconsolate. “I mean, the whole point was supposed to be for Sev to see the picture. That’s what Remus said. Only now I don’t know what to think.”

“Well, if it helps,” Evan offered, with the sort of rueful smile that admitted he knew it really, really wouldn’t, “all four of them are recorded in the same log-book, and Potter’s the only one who skulks around obsessively. Siri and Pettigrew come around sometimes, but I think it’s just to visit people, most of the time. Lupin’s only followed us home once, and he’d just seen Severus acting very unlike himself, so I didn’t really blame him.”

“That doesn’t help _at all,_ ” she said baldly.

“No, s’pose not. But maybe you’re right about the envelope, at least.”

She made a face at him, and dubiously asked, “If it isn’t hexed, can you open it?”

At least she took Potter’s warnings seriously. She’d never believed Severus’s. “You don’t _have_ to be married to do the mail-proxy spell,” he told her, entertained and, privately, a little wistful. “I know it’s on most of the more up-to-date lists of suggestions for what to include in the handfasting, but it’s not one of the ones that needs to be between family to work.”

Not that he’d ever wasted any time looking at any of those lists that mothers of the brides had left cluttering up the studio after haranguing their daughters for hours over wedding arrangements. No indeed.

He couldn’t understand why they did that. It was a time-saver, yes, but it always made the bride look so _oppressed and harried,_ which was not what one wanted in a portrait. On the up-side, should he ever become unable to paint, he was sure he had enough information to be a quite successful event planner.

If he lost the ability to paint and also got a complete personality replacement. _Ugh_. Those people never had _five seconds_ to breathe, as far as he could tell.

She gave him a very offensive awed look, and breathed in a tone to match it, “He really trusts you.”

Irked, he twitched his mouth into an amused smile that was only a little stiff. “That or he finally got tired of opening his own howlers and drippy ‘love letters’ packed with unsubtle insults and saturated with stinking perfume that turns out to be cursed,” he suggested blandly, and wand-tapped the envelope open.

They looked at the photograph together. There were a lot of peace signs. And pretending-to-be-daisies. And not-pretending-very-hard-to-be-rainbows. There was a great and sorry deal of overlap between these three symbols. Even a rainbow-colored peace sign with daisy petals along the rim.

“Oh!” Lily sighed, relieved. “I thought it was going to be _awful_.”

“It is awful,” Evan said, appalled. “Has he gone color-blind?” He didn’t _think_ werewolves were color-blind on two legs, if they hadn’t been before the bite. Spike had never said they were, and he didn’t remember it from DADA. He didn’t remember Lupin having the kind of trouble in Potions that would have suggested he was.

He would have remembered, too: Slughorn had insisted on mixed-House cauldrons, and he’d worked with Lupin as often as he could arrange it, which was almost always. It was more peaceful that way. Other Gryffs had been aggressive or squeaky about any-Slytherins-at-all, or spent half the time trying to pinch his bum (which would have been fine with him, until he’d turned sixteen and Spike-oriented, _in a less explosive class)_ , or been as mad-alchemist-like as Spike was only without the careful record-keeping and rigorous attention to detail. In the latter category, Ev had preferred to leave Siri to Avery, who was just happy to do the grunt work, and Evans to Spike. Who could not only more than keep up with her clever-booting but very nearly control her impulsiveness.

“No, that’s…” she tried to explain.

It made _absolutely no sense_ until she gave up and admitted that the art style was inspired by drug-induced hallucinations, and then it was Evan’s turn to say, “Oh!” He quizzed her a bit about which drugs, until she was laughing over his familiarity with the effects. He sniffed haughtily: hadn’t she been at school in the same decade he had? He knew for a fact Tessa Sprout had supplied all the Houses indiscriminately under her aunt’s often-smudged nose.

She wouldn’t have laughed if she knew that some of his familiarity was because his father and Abraxas Malfoy had a Project on for the Dark Lord. Maybe someday he’d tell her, though, how Spike had gotten on weed the first time they’d all tried it—and the last time Spike had. That had been hysterical for everyone but Severus, who had been very nearly hysterical himself, poor paranoid thing. Evan had made sure no one else remembered that. Mulciber would never, ever have let him forget _I can’t want to move my hands!_

When he’d given her a minute to enjoy the image of wasted serpents, he said seriously, “Right, we’re going to go fix this amateur monstrosity,” wrinkled his nose, and paused to grin at her snickering. “But first—”

“It’s not so bad,” she defended her friend, understandably but incorrectly. “I don’t think Sev will be that upset, really.”

“No,” he agreed. “But if I fix it it’ll be nicer for the locals, and if he can see that the hand that fixed up his old playground was yours, he’ll be _happy_ about it.”

Rather than an offensive awed look, this time she gave him one that made him want to edge away, which she again probably did not intend to have that affect. “You really love him, don’t you,” she said in an absolutely mushy tone.

His jaw dropped a little. Eventually he managed, “Lily, I realize I have excellent hair, but I am not, actually, a girl. And this, however cunningly embroidered, is in fact a waistcoat, not a bodice, and I do not want it ripped.”

The shirt, that was fine, Spike could rip the shirt off him, no problem, opposite of a problem, that was reparable and highly compelling and Spike should get over having been poor once someday and do it much more often. His waistcoats were _art_.

She laughed. “Now you sound like Sirius. Well, except for the clotheshorsey bit.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” he went on with dignity. As if Sirius didn’t store his wretched muggle band shirts in tissue paper and have diagrams about which shoes to wear them with depending on whether he felt like being sexy or an especially blatant eyesore. “Before we go back out, did you come here for any other reason? Anything you want to tell us or ask before we go public again?”

She considered. Slowly, she said, “Well… he didn’t say not to, and I don’t understand why… I suppose I was hoping to see if Sev could figure it out.” He quirked an eyebrow at her, and she explained, “Professor Dumbledore wants me to start telling James how much I miss Madam Pomfrey.”

He took a second to think about it. Then, “Ooooohhhhh,” he crooned, starting to smile, and also to walk back down the hall. “You know, Severus tells me it’s very hard, in Chinese art, to tell the difference between a lion’s face and a dragon’s?”

“…Er?”

“Tricksy, tricksy, Dumbledore,” he said happily as he drifted upstairs. “I see why he didn’t want to explain to you.”

“Oh, no, you _don’t,_ ” she threatened, voice rising and probably eyes widening as she realized he intended to not-explain, too.

“Quite right, too,” he confirmed, unapologetically pleased. “Much better if it’s genuinely Potter’s own idea.”

As he opened the door onto the street, she screamed from behind him, _“I hate everybody!_ ”

Evan laughed out loud, and wondered which of them had picked it up from the other.

Potter looked as though he’d been eating his fingernails down to the knuckles, and as though this heartfelt cry had deeply reassured him. Quite understandable, on both counts. So Evan beamed sunnily at him, clapped him on the shoulder, and chirped, “Buck up, coz!” Which, for some reason, made Potter start. Evan took note of that but apparently-overlooked it, going on happily, “We’re going on a field trip, because your bunny friend _cannot paint to save his life!_ ”

“My… bunny friend,” Potter repeated, flat and lost at the same time.

Lily stormed heavily up the stairs and kicked Evan in the shin. “It’s _Lupin,_ ” she snarled. “Not _Lapin!_ ”

“Well,” Evan said apologetically, rubbing his leg, “really, Lily, if he didn’t want people to muck up his name, he shouldn’t have let his parents name him Rebus. Everyone gets those wrong.”

Lily kicked him again. It was just like spending time with Narcissa. When she was six.

Potter looked pleased and hopeful and confused and as though he’d completely forgotten to think Evan might be a threat in any way whatsoever. Even though Evan had _blown up his wand_ one time, and then gotten away with it despite Potter telling on him to a very old and high-ranking and well-respected wizard.

Clearly Lily was much cleverer than he’d given her credit for. Clever like Spike, too, in that shouty way that was effectively subtle because everyone was too busy staring at it in horror to realize that it was getting things done—although he thought she was probably doing it on instinct, rather than on purpose like Spike did.

Either way, he ought to send her flowers later. Not chocolates, because who knew what a pregnant witch would think was edible. He wondered whether she’d understand.

Not that Potter relaxing around Evan would help Spike, not much, not exactly, but it was an chink in his armor, an unguarded spot Ev could gently pry open until he could find something really useful to work with. The opportunity was entirely worth the bruises and the loss of his nap hour, and he could probably still pick up a decent pudding before Spike got home.

Or at least a bottle of something elf-made that would knock the tragically pedestrian socks off Severus’s finely-turned white ankles. That would be much easier than finding something sweet to impress him with, and Spike would probably make a pudding that was actually pudding if Evan mentioned wanting something gooey. And if Ev also picked up some things that could be impaled barbarically on sticks, they could curl up in front of the fire and toast them, and dip toasted cake in the pudding. Or at least Evan could. And bop Spike in the nose with it and watch his eyes cross.

And then Severus would complain about sticky bits and crumbs and things in the rug (as if his awful gobstones weren’t ten times worse even now that Ev had replaced the liquid inside with some that smelled nice) until Evan just had no _choice_ but to wrestle him down and shut him up and show him what stickiness worth complaining about was, mmm.

He wondered whether anyone else in the world complained bitterly about things they could fix with a wand-wave just to remind themselves that they wouldn’t mind the way they’d be shut up. Possible, he supposed, but really he was fairly sure he had the only one. Ha.

* * *

[1] _The Wicket Gate_ , June 6 (ch. 5)

[2] Let it be reiterated that Evan never did finish the book.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Evan makes a spectacle of himself over lichen, and Lucius has a Cunning Plan (well, Severus, actually, but it's so much more likely to happen if Luke gets to take the credit...).
> 
>  **Notes** : Some other author out there in fandom originated the term 'hat-stall.' I have no idea who and forget where I read it. If someone knows I'll try to revise, but honestly I'm in grad school and need to look for a more stable job. Re-posting already-up chapters is waaayyyyy down on my list. :\


	54. July, Week III: Dartmoor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Evan snogs a splendid young elm tree and Regulus Black does not wish to go spelunking.
> 
> Or:
> 
> Severus plots with Lucius and goes to the seaside with Regulus. At least one of these things will prove less or more innocent than it sounds. And that's just on Severus's end...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : These are actually not the nicest people in the whole world. Most of them are either purebloods or Death Eaters, and everyone but Evan thinks being at least one of those things is quite important, for better or worse.
> 
> That said, nobody dies. Yet. }:D
> 
>  **Chapter notes** : For anyone who is keeping track/cares, the last few chapters have been more different fom their [gen variants](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9920703/1/Valley-of-the-Shadow-gen) than usual. And this one, even more than them. Because relationships do change things, although not always in the obvious and expected ways.
> 
>  **Q &A notes**: To keep from clogging up the bottom of the page, the Q&A section will be moved to its own post on Archive of Our Own. I'll continue to put a question and at least one character's answer below the chapters as an omake. Or possibly a teaser...
> 
> The link will be added to this chapter once that post is up, at which point this line of text will go poof.
> 
> In the flurry of classes starting and giving me MATH THEORY UGH, I think I lost track of at least one person's question. If you have one, whether new or old-but-unanswered, please send it in!

It was a good thing that Regulus and the Malfoys (Draco, staying with his grandparents, excepted) had all come to keep the loons company while they got acquainted with Dartmoor. They nearly lost Evan over the stone-churned waters of the River Erne, and Reg didn't think Severus could have handled that one by himself. Not without getting either wet or painted, anyway. Then they nearly lost him again at a rough, white-speckled, slightly convex granite clapper bridge nestled in among greenery he flatly refused to believe in.

"…Er?" Severus inquired.

"No, he's right," Regulus agreed, staring. "Grass doesn't go all _hot green_ like that."

"You've been in the city too long," Severus advised him. "Didn't you ever go outside at school except on the pitch?"

"It wasn't that bright yellowish, you know it wasn't!"

"And you've spent too much time in Europe," Lucius told Evan judiciously.

Evan didn't stop squinting at the grey square of cardstock he was floating against the green, or taking notes. "They have _paint in a can,_ " he said mournfully, "it goes all over everything like a mist, you could cover quite a large area in no time."

Lucius patted him on the back and said, "Father and I will be racing a few of the Abraxans in Ireland in a few weeks; why don't you come? You can see what _real_ grass looks like."

His wife and her youngest cousin, however, were busy looking in anticipatory curiosity and alarm, respectively (so much alarm), at Severus. His face had gone over all funny (funnier) about the time Evan had said 'mist.' In fact, he looked rather as though he wanted a pointy little goatee to stroke, or Narcissa's white kneazle, or to tap his steepled fingers together in an intrigued little rhythm. Since he wasn't voicing his thought, however, they looked at each other and decided on patience.

"I said," Lucius repeated, annoyed his bait hadn't been taken, " _Severus,_ that I'd take Evan to Ireland and he could see what real grass looks like."

"What?" Severus blinked. "Oh. No, no, I'm just happy _un Malfoi_ is acknowledging the superiority of British greenery generally, we can work up to specific national enlightenment."

"It's all textury and it has white freckles, look," Evan told Severus happily. "Can't we stay? What if the light isn't like this tomorrow?!"

"Take a photograph," Severus advised him, not unsympathetically. " _And_ we brought the pensieve, _and_ the weather's supposed to hold."

"Besides," Narcissa put in cunningly, "what if the light's _better?_ And you can come at dawn, won't a sunup here be just what you want?"

" _Noooooo,_ " Evan moaned, and wrapped his arms around a tree.

"Come on, Drama," Severus said tolerantly, and started trying to pull him away, experimentally plucking and tugging at various bendy bits in turn. Evan, in Reg's opinion, looked far too smug about this. Reg was sure he was doing it on purpose to be groped.

"There are standing stones and all sorts of ruins and abandoned things," Spike word-painted persuasively, apparently oblivious to being manipulated into making a public display of himself, although you could never quite tell with them. He might just think that as long as he looked like he didn't know he was humoring Evan everyone would think nothing of it. His face was so completely long-suffering there was no way to be sure.

"They'll be all textury, too," he went on. "Imagine what a national-grade Quidditch pitch looks like a month _before_ the Isle Cup. I expect it's all neglected and desolate and shabbier than the public would expect. There might be sweet packets dancing in the wind. Very mournful and haunting. Possibly ironic, even. You could get a whole exhibition out of it. Probably in time for the World Cup, if not the Isle."

"…Would they let us _play?_ " he asked, grip loosening and a grin spreading goofily over his face as he let Severus propel him away.

"Not a chance," Severus sympathized.

"Of course they will," Lucius scoffed.

They looked at each other.

Narcissa patted Severus on the hand. Severus sighed, and said, "I'm not comfortable with this, for the record."

"Excellent," she said cheerfully. "Seeing you look miserably uncomfortable will make the bribee much happier about everything, and then Reggie won't have to do it."

"Might not need a bribe-in-gold if I do end up doing a whatnot," Evan pointed out. "Publicity and all."

Severus relaxed, and Narcissa shot Evan a reproachful look. "You could have waited!" she chided.

"He can fake it now, you watch," Evan gloated, cuddling Severus's arm. Severus looked at him, his face a sad-greyhound, stressed picture of _why are you doing this to me?_

"What won't I have to do?" Reg asked, frowning, now that everyone was too busy eyeing Severus in amusement to talk and he could get a word in.

"Look apologetic and squirmy," she explained. "You do it very well, darling, but the Black heir really can't go about looking uncertain all the time. The people who don't think they can take advantage get unnerved."

"I don't go about looking uncertain, do I?" he asked Severus, offended.

"You and your cousin will have to have your disagreements without my input," Severus said hastily, and hauled Evan several steps ahead. Before Regulus had even stopped Looking Betrayed At Him, he tilted his head, clearly stricken by another idea, and called, "Oi, Luke!"

Neither the proud Lucian cackling nor the familial squabbling lasted until lunch, or even the next tor Evan stopped to reverie over or patch of moss Severus bent down to sample (Regulus seriously didn't understand how they ever got anything done ever, and he completely understood how Linkin had gotten the way he was when Kreacher said he'd been a very sweet-tempered erkling). The Slughornesque plotting, however, did.

The Wizarding community in Dartmoor wasn't _quite_ muggle-free. The muggle presence at its gate, however, was very small, existing more or less exclusively to cater to the tourists who were the areas revenue. Their owners were under a geas not to notice how many more delivery trucks came up the road to them than they needed, and muggle-repelling charms had always been more than sufficient to keep the pests out of where they weren't welcome. Even Lucius didn't grumble about them, especially as some of them had his father for a landlord.

Lucius did grumble about having to apparate into town proper before lunch and home afterwards, this being bad for the digestion. Severus told him that _eating kelpie_ was bad for the digestion, and the relative local plentitude was _by no means_ the only reason that Dartmoor was about the only place in England you could get it fresh.

Sniffing at him, Lucius insisted that if you didn't eat the local delicacies the locals got insulted. Severus retorted that if you didn't eat those of the local delicacies which did not intrinsically resemble food before seeing locals eat them, the locals realized you weren't a know-nothing tourist who could be cozened into eating any damn thing for their amusement.

He refrained, however, from pointing out a passing waitress's sudden frantically repressed coughing fit, and did, when Narcissa held out her hand pointedly, slip her a digestive potion under the table. With an eye roll, but in silence. This unusual restraint was intelligent of him, Reg thought, given they had a plan on. Lucius was fully capable of going huffy and sabotaging something he'd thought five minutes ago would be terrific fun.

When the pale-blonds had gone and they were out under the long (and rather oppressive, in Reg's opinion) stretch of unending blue sky and away from people again, Evan said long-sufferingly to Severus, "I suppose you want to go haunt the haunts of your friend with the awful hat."

"No," Severus said long-sufferingly back (Regulus had to look up at the clouds to avoid snickering at them), "that can wait. You can go play with your rivers and bridges; Reg and I are going to get some sea air."

While Reg's neck froze, despite his having known perfectly well it was coming, Evan straightened up, all indignant pathos. "You're going to the shore without me?"

"I'll go to the shore with you," Severus told him with a low, growly, promising sort of emphasis that made Regulus want to be somewhere else instantly (preferably in a bed, shower, or six feet in earth), "another time."

"But now would be so nice," Evan said in a reasonable pointing-out-the-obvious sort of voice, swaying in close to Severus and sliding twining hands up his arms. Regulus dropped his eyes into one hand and sighed. At least when he'd been a kid and Sirius had done this sort of thing with attractive strangers, they'd usually had friends he could bond with out of mutual despair.

Severus had the good manners to pretend for a moment that he was being swayed, taking advantage of it to get a kiss in, but then said firmly, "You won't think it's nice if we catch any jellyfish. I've seen you with a scalpel; you turn green and then you sulk all day about how badly it goes with your hair."

Evan sighed dolefully into his face and he sighed back in mockery that was amused and rather soft, for him. Evan gave him enormous blue eyes, and then, when he didn't budge, frowned speculatively. Standing off to the side of them, Reg didn't see Severus's expression change, but Evan must have seen something. His face went all narrow-eyed and abstracted. Lance-face.

He leaned back without letting Severus go, and said, "Some of those jellyfish have nasty stingy things, Spike."

"Did you learn about lion's manes from 'my friend with the awful hat'?" Severus asked, mouth pulling up crookedly and eyes crinkling.

Evan ignored this, asking intently, "You'll be careful?"

"Rubber gloves, as for _house cleaning,_ " Severus said with a light but definite emphasis (Reg didn't know what that meant. Wizards preferred impervius charms on their hands or dragonhide where wandwork was insufficient, and Kreacher had never mentioned house elves needing gloves at all), "should see us through, even if… the sand is too mucky to move through freely."

"No backup plan?" Evan asked unhappily.

"Available data strongly suggests sufficiency," Severus assured him, brisk and cryptic, his bony hand cupped against it making Evan's lightly tanned face look broad and ruddy by comparison. "But I've got the hotel portkey."

"It's touch-and-keyword?" Evan asked. He sounded as if he was asking for confirmation, not new information. When Severus nodded, he snapped, "You keep it tied to your palm, you hear me?"

"Yes, Mam," Severus said. Though his voice droned, his eyes were warm and his face said _good idea_ and he'd started to pull a reel of leather cord out of a pocket (who carried cord in their pockets?) before he'd finished.

"All right," Evan said when he'd done, with an air of being barely satisfied. "You look over there," he ordered Reg, scowling and mulish, with a definite suggestion of _this is all your fault._ He was pointing nowhere in particular, as far as Reg could make out.

"What?" Reg stared at him.

"For pity's sake," Severus eye-rolled, not even _before_ getting dragged behind a tree. Evan was occasionally faster than he looked. It was a Seeker thing.

Then again, turtles were occasionally faster than Evan looked.

"Oh," Reg sighed, and rolled his own eyes.

They did go to a deserted stretch of shore and accio some jellyfish, because Severus said the way they glowed in the dark without magic was very helpful when you were working with magical viruses in cells on slides. Regulus begged him not to explain that. So of course he took offense at the idea of willful ignorance, on principle, and did.

"I think that's enough," Severus said judiciously when he'd stuffed far more jellyfish than Regulus ever wanted to see again into what was, at least for the moment, an enormous glass jar.

Re-shrinking it, he renewed its stasis, sealant, and cushioning charms, and replaced it in one of his hidden wizard-space pockets. Reggie had it on good authority that Narcissa quietly paid her tailor again whenever anyone could bully Severus into buying new outer clothes, because all said pockets and his sullen aversion to embellishments and fashion trends left the man in furious tears that were, as far as anyone could tell, not a ploy. She threw in bottles of Severus's own brandy and fruit mead when he needed new shirts, too, because of the cuffs that went up to his elbows which had never been a fashion trend in, as she put it, the history of ever.

He said they kept his shirtsleeves out his workspace, and his wand secure when he needed both hands, and were very practical, but wasn't fooling anyone. He'd also worn trousers that, while not legging-tight like Reg preferred, were still cut close enough to be worn under tall boots on his edgier days since he'd had a choice about it. Which had been, not entirely coincidentally, since it had gotten out at school that it was possible for people to turn each other upside-down.

"Time to go, then?" Reg asked, swallowing.

Severus pulled out his pocket watch and shrugged. "Ev'll be hours yet, and we've been in such a push down at the lab I feel I haven't gotten any air all summer. Besides, I fancy your Da'll be pleased if you come home with a bit of color. Let's just sit a bit."

"Er… all right," Reg agreed dubiously, and they both turned their handkerchiefs into blankets to stretch out on. He couldn't help smiling. "You still can't transfigure in color?"

"Shut it," Severus said grouchily, resting his head on crossed arms against the grey fabric. "Not my fault the Tartan refused to explain thaumachromatic theory. I do if something has a color it's _supposed_ to be, anyway. Chicks come out yellow and all that. It only comes out grey when it could be anything. I haven't had the time for a really extensive library dive over something that trivial."

"Or you could just _will things to be colors,_ " Reg suggested helpfully.

"That's what Evan says," he said, annoyed, "but it doesn't work."

"It works for everybody else, Spike," he grinned at the sky.

"'Everybody else' clearly has fluffy picture-book See Spot Run crayon brains, Reggie," Severus drawled.

He laughed helplessly. It was just possible that from Severus's perspective this was true, and how _frustrating_ for poor Spike when that very simplicity let the pigs and sheep and squawky pixies and garden gnomes do things he couldn't. "Even Evan?" he teased.

"Especially Evan," Severus rolled his eyes. "Although I suppose in his case it would be an ink-illuminated manuscript, regardless of the quality of the text. He enjoys pastels, but I haven't seen him use crayons."

"You're just afraid everyone will find out your favorite color went from green to aqua in fourth year," Reg teased.

Severus kicked a grumpy, half-hearted wave of sand at him, which was in no way a denial, and they subsided into comfortable silence. It wasn't hot out, exactly, until you'd been lying in one spot with your face to the sun for a while, and the waves were lulling. Reg's eyes drooped.

He could just feel himself starting to drop off when he could just barely hear Severus whisper, " _Tabula adamantium,_ " and then his eyes flew open.

"What was that?" he demanded, caught between alarm and being half-asleep.

"Right," Severus said, already sitting crosslegged and cool-eyed, "this is how it works. I'm going to explain a decision for you to make, you'll make it, you'll lie down again, you'll forget I disturbed you at all, and we'll go. There will be no planning done for you to remember, except what was done last month while Kreacher was just come back. And you were so overwrought then that I don't, honestly, think _he'll_ be able to stand getting anywhere near it. And if _she_ hasn't so far, I don't think she will, do you?"

"I'll do _what?_ " he squawked. Demanded. Definitely demanded.

Severus sighed at him. "That was meant to be reassuring, Reg."

"It failed!" he sputtered. "That was disturbing! Unutterably disturbing! What do you think you're about, just casting some spell I've never heard of on me and telling me I'm going to forget everything? Have you done this to me before?" An even worse prospect occurred. Severus was notoriouslyexperimental. "Have you done this _at all_ before?!"

"I just told you what I'm about," Severus said, in very nearly the same long-suffering voice he'd used on Evan. "And really, Reggie, what's the point of asking me questions like that? Either I've done this to you before with your consent, or without it because you needed the ignorance for reasons you'd agree with, or I haven't done it to you at all, or I'm not trustworthy. In any of those cases the answer's going to be no. The only possible way I'd tell you yes would be if I'd done it with your consent for a reason that was," he waved a hand aimlessly, "tactically sensitive rather than having to do with something that would be emotional for you. In which case I suppose it would be all right to tell you now because you wouldn't remember in five minutes. In which case, what good would it do you? But yes, the spell has been tested. It's reliable."

"Well, that's something!"

Severus patiently talked over him. "I'll answer that question if you insist, with the caveat that if I _have_ used it on you I won't give you specifics, but the only question that matters at the moment is whether you trust me."

"Not at the moment!"

"A laudably Slytherin knee-jerk answer," Severus said drolly, "but we both know it's rot. Of course you trust me, don't be ridiculous; you just _went to sleep on a deserted beach_ next to me. Knowing perfectly well I'd have my wand and my usual potions arsenal ready to hand. You've had your hackles raised, that's all. Perfectly natural. If it makes you feel better, I _have_ used it on Evan. And yes, of course, he knows."

"…Does that mean you haven't used it on me before?" he asked suspiciously. His hackles were, indeed, settling at this news, although he wasn't sure whether or not it was against his will.

Severus rolled his eyes. "No, it doesn't mean that, but in fact I haven't. I used it on your grandfather once, though, with his permission. That's why your parents agreed to let Kreacher play dead but didn't quite seem to know why. He agreed you were safer the fewer people knew why you were really upset."

"…I didn't think Granddad liked you," Reg stared.

"Oh, kitten," the Naj sighed, disappointed in him. "He doesn't have to like me. He just has to know how it is between me and his er more reliable grandchildren, and decide for himself if he thinks I'm a leech, or using you like a ladder, or not."

Despite still being rather shaken, Regulus found himself snorting at that idea. "Well, you are on the short side," he noted.

"I have perfectly adequate boots I do not need to stand on your feet thank you very much also I can fly I have a broom," Severus sniffed without pausing for breath or bothering to argue that actually it was more that Reg and Sirius were on the tall side. Which was in fact the case. Anyway, one never actually noticed Severus being shorter than oneself, even with his boots off. Probably even _Lupin_ didn't, although Rodolphus might. (Probably Evan noticed while they were snogging, but Reg Wasn't Thinking About That.)

"It's a very nice broom," Reg agreed, swallowing a smile. Silver Arrows actually were very nice brooms, even by Black standards. Severus was, in a quiet sort of way, rather smirky about his. Not because it was a nice broom per se, but because one of his own recipes was used in production. He always preferred to trade than do currency-based business, especially when by doing so he was getting his name out there and helping a Sherwood business, and even more so when he'd managed a deal that encompassed repairs and trade-ins.

Then he realized, and yelped, "Oi—you're _managing_ me!"

"Just giving you a minute to calm down in," Severus assured him, swallowing his own quirk of a smile. Then he noted, pleased, "And you noticed right away! Narcissa would be very pleased with both of us."

"Not subtle," Regulus sulked.

"Cobra," Severus reminded him, amused. "We don't do subtle. Noted for it."

" _Ha,_ " Reg agreed sourly, and sighed. "What's the decision, then?"

"It's about memory again," Severus told him. "We've both been getting better at occluding, but Reg, if we're going to go where no one should have lived to know to take us…" He raised his eyebrows in warning.

"We shouldn't?"

"Don't be stupid, of course I'm going," Severus said at once, looking at him as though he were crazy. "You don't have to if you'd rather not, just tell Kreacher to take me," he added, as though it had only just occurred to him Regulus might not be panting to go take samples of glowy poison-green liquids in dark, wet, drippy underground caverns. This was probably the case. Severus was mental, it was not news.

Regulus glared at him. "Oh, thank you, because Evan force-feeding me my intestines would be _so_ much better."

Severus waved a dismissive hand. "I haven't told Ev anything; he's surfing on guesswork and plausible deniability."

"Wonderful, so that's his Solstice present taken care of," Reg grouched. "He's still _very obviously_ quite sure of quite enough to quite solidly blame me if you stub your toe."

Severus looked rather charmed by this thought. Brightly, he observed, "If you're arguing yourself into it rather than out of it, you must want to go."

" _Stop doing it out loud!"_ wailed Reg. He did _not_ want to go, but you didn't let people go alone. Especially people who had been born with too many brains instead of anything resembling common sense. He couldn't send Kreacher out alone with a not-a-master again, either.

He just got laughed at, so he sulked. Er, glared. Failing, though not horribly badly, to look sympathetic instead of amused, Severus offered, "I could manage you some more, if you like."

"Certainly not," he said haughtily, rather grateful for the opportunity to decide to pull himself together. One thing you could say about Severus: he expected you to take those, when he gave them to you, but he gave them to you. "All right, then, it's about memory?"

Turning businesslike himself, Severus nodded. "There are options. I wasn't suggesting either of us not go, but do you think your occlumency would stand up to keeping the trip from Bellatrix? Can you keep from giving her a guilty 'lets hope she's not looking for anything' to guide her right to it?"

"No," he admitted. The problem with having Bella in his head was that even when he didn't want to tell her everything, he wanted to want to, wanted to be able to, wanted her to smile proudly at every corner of him. Even when quite a lot of him was screaming that she wasn't that Bella anymore, if she ever really had been, that actually he couldn't stand being the Regulus that today's Bella was proud of. He had to work so hard at not letting her know it that he didn't think he'd have any attention left to spare for concealing secrets even more dangerous than his splintered feelings.

"I didn't think so," Severus said. But he didn't sound disappointed or resigned. He sounded as if he knew exactly what Regulus was thinking and it was so entirely to be expected that even resignation was overdramatic, this was just the way the world went, he knew how it was.

Regulus felt his eyes go different sizes. He blinked rapidly, and asked, "Is that what it's like to be a halfblood?"

Severus's face went extremely wry. He looked up for a moment and asked a cloud sourly, "Am I quite sure I can't let him remember this?" After a long, long sigh, he told Reg, "That's what it's like to learn the God Parent is neither perfect nor omniscient when you still love them and they still love you. Most people do this considerably younger, you know. Generally around an age when there's a Head of House about to make cocoa, although I think I was about four. No one's fault, really, I only wanted our mittens to be warmer, not set them on fire… anyway, how was I supposed to know wishing would work?"

Sometimes Severus came out with things like that, things you just had to not think about. A child's first magic turning into something you had to not think about instead of something to celebrate was… something it was better not to think about. He'd made it very clear he didn't want anybody Going To Have A Word With his father. Although he hadn't been able to make it clear why to Reg, up till right now.

"Bella's not my mum," he muttered, trying to crowd the image of Severus being small and helpless out of his head. For something as impossible to picture as that, it was surprisingly difficult.

"Like fun she's not," Severus snorted. "Just do remember, please, the next three times this happens to you, that Narcissa, Evan and I will all neither walk out on you nor hex you into the ground if you tell us we're worrying you or putting you in a difficult position, and even I will probably only bite your head off metaphorically."

"And then you'll apologize because Evan will smack you," Reg suggested, trying to smile.

"I smack Evan, Narcissa kicks me, no one kicks Narcissa but once she's expressed herself she becomes reasonably reasonable," he said philosophically. "Evan doesn't need to smack anyone, but occasionally skewers pillows on my nose for fun, the heartless bastard. Evan the Terrible, Vander the Impaler."

"Note to self: on next occasion of world-shattering disillusionment, employ pincer movement," Reg drawled.

"That's the way," Severus lauded him, and made Regulus despair for the universe by not seeming in any way to be joking. "Now, if we're going to keep her from finding anything, there are a few options. Operating on the assumption that it will be possible to keep any memory you keep as safe as you decide to keep it."

He looked at Regulus pointedly. Reg nodded, attending soberly. He wasn't a bad occlumens against anyone Bellatrix had tested him against besides herself, it was just that there were some people he couldn't want to say no to.

And that was only right. Wanting to deny family was wrong, that was the whole point, wasn't it? That had been Siri's whole issue: he'd been born with that wicked, perverse streak. Reg didn't have it. He was largely grateful, he thought, even if sometimes it was a problem.

Severus nodded back. "On that assumption, then. First question: do you want to remember this at all, later, and if not, do you want the option of accessing the memory at some later point?"

"Obliviation with maybe a pensieve, you mean?" he asked. Severus nodded, but wagged a hand in a sort-of-not-really motion. "Definitely with a pensieve if we do that, but what are the other choices?"

"I want to be precise with you," Severus said, holding his eyes. "I don't like obliviation; it's messy, and hard to make sure you only do what you mean to do. People can end up fuddled. If you chose to completely forget I'd use this spell again. It stops your brain from saving what happens under it into your memory in the first place. Yes, it's my spell. Everything I'm going to suggest is my spell. And I've tested them all. I would have submitted the suite for my charmsmithing mastery if things," he moved his left arm suggestively, "hadn't started heating up. I'm not making a guinea pig of you, Reg."

"…Sorry," Reg said quietly, looking down.

"Nonsense," Severus said, smiling his crooked quarter smile. "I would have been screaming and throwing things in your place. It's terrifyingly obvious to me that you do not, in fact, need to be given my word before you're comfortable enough to freeze my blood. But you ought to, so you have it all the same."

Reg thought about that. "I'm not stupid just because I don't mind trusting my intuition without analyzing it to death," he told Severus finally. "I _stuck_ with Divi, you know. That's what it's for, for most people: getting a feel for the patterns, knowing what you know before you know why."

Severus looked startled, then annoyed. "Why didn't she _tell_ me that?" he demanded, meaning Narcissa.

Reg bit back a grin. "Probably thought your nerves were raw enough you didn't need the formal-ish intuition training for you to listen to them. And that you were never going to make sense of the social bits even if she took notes for you and made you do diagrams," he answered honestly. "And it's possible Slughorn might have mentioned there's a lot of Arithmancy in advanced Potions, but you didn't hear that from me… Shut up, I'm telling you something."

"Sir," Severus drawled.

This was compliance, so Reg overlooked the tone. "We've both been watching the world since our first years, you'n me," he told Severus, "keeping an eye out for when to duck. Only, the world I was watching had you in it, and yours didn't. So you can shut up about our Spike, who I know you've heard a lot about but have not in fact met, and get on with it."

"…I haven't met me?"

" _Clearly_."

"…I meant more caution with everyone, you know, not me in particular."

"I _know_ you think you count as anyone-and-everyone. Because you do an awfully good impression of an idiot sometimes, for a genius. That's what I meant."

This was apparently too much for Severus. He froze like a glitchy piece of technomancy, then went over all deadpan and started talking like a textbook about very complicated and worrying memory spells. Very rapidly, too, and loudly enough to chop off Reg's unserpently mushy feelings (phew) and make him suddenly realize he'd been trusting they were under Severus's muffliato spell the whole time.

Rot. He _hated_ proving people's points for them. Especially when the odds were so good that they'd noticed and were Kindly Not Mentioning It.

Reg wasn't even going to try and lay odds on whether Severus was going to be content with knowing Reg had noticed. He could see from the glint in Spike's eye that he knew Reg had.

Unfortunately, Spike had never quite gotten over being the one Reg had gone to for tutoring with his homework and when he didn't know what to do about older students preying on his empty-headed roommate.

It wasn't like the way Evan and Narcissa treated him like the baby. Everyone in his family did that. Quite a lot of people in his year at school had done that, even once he'd had his prefect badge. Severus treated Reg like his _responsibility_.

It would have been an outrage if Severus didn't do this, to some extent, even with people he couldn't stand. Having once seen Spike defend Mulciber and Avery (badly) from Lily Evans not three hours after he'd gotten hexed for warning them off her, Reg did realize he was more or less doomed in this department.

That wasn't going to make it any more fun to wait on tenterhooks to find out whether Spike was going to let his own realization of failure be his teacher or ask Narcissa to book him sessions with Lucius's dueling tutor. That man was a _menace_.

Reg's jaw dropped. He _wasn't going to remember this,_ was he? Oh, no, it would definitely be the dueling teacher, and he wasn't going to know why, and Narcissa wouldn't be able to tell him, and…!

He said, "Spike, you have a notebook, don't you? I just thought of something I need to talk about with Granddad. Nothing to do with the trip we're taking, I promise, but I don't want to forget it when, you know."

Severus looked at him suspiciously, and kept being suspicious while Reg wrote himself a note in the page he'd torn out and handed over. And rightly so.

Because Reg might be doomed, but he'd get Spike back. He'd get Granddad to take over the family Lammas dinner, and make sure Evan's invitation was To The Household Of My Beloved Grandson and not just My Dear Evan I Hope You May Join Me. Spike was always _miserable_ at those family affairs, and had never yet come away from one without making Mother compare him favorably with Sirius (and then sending Sirius a Howler, which Reg would have felt badly about if he thought Siri cared even a little).

Bwa- _ha_.

That evening, Reg found a blank piece of paper in his breast pocket. No ink showed up on it whatever charm he used, or when he held it over a flame or got it wet.

When flooed, Severus said, "Oh, that's from my notebook. If we'd had to separate, you could have folded a bird or airplane to call me if you'd needed to keep Kreacher with you and shouting had been a bad idea."

"I wrote on it and the ink disappeared in about two minutes," Reg told him, baffled. "That's not very useful! What if you'd needed a map to find me or something, or instructions?"

"Well, there are such things as point-me and my own brains and you telling the elf to come bring me to you," Severus drawled. "In any case, I loaned Kreacher a sealed envelope with the runes to disenchant the page if you'd needed to. It was out of my personal notebook, Reg. Where I write such things as, perhaps, spell notes? And potion ideas? And things I might have to remember for or about Certain People? Sensitive and proprietary information, you might consider it? _Obviously_ any marks on the paper are going to disappear once they're in someone else's possession."

"Oh," Reg scratched his ear, feeling a bit foolish. "Yeah, okay, I can see you'd want to do that."

Severus rolled his eyes a little. "I'm so glad," he droned. "Incidentally, before I forget, Narcissa says to drop by the Manor in the morning. I'd make sure to have an early night, were I you. Were I me as well, as a matter of fact, so—"

"GOOD NIGHT, REGULUS," Evan's voice bawled out of the fireplace, pointed and decided.

Regulus sighed.

* * *

****Q &A teaser!****   
_For the rest of it,[click here.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2380514)  
_

**Louise** (to the Marauders): I'll add the standard job interview question about strengths and weaknesses, because we can rattle them off on their behalf, but I wonder what their own honest self-perceptions would be.

James: Well, I'd say I'm equally amazing at Seeker and Chaser, but I like playing Seeker better and there aren't as many people who can do it well, you need your eyes to work a certain way, it doesn't matter if your actual vision is bad as long as your glasses stay on. I'll admit I'm a rubbish Keeper. Not bad as a Beater, but, you know, wasted in it when I can do other things better, and Siri and Pete are really good. Then, when it comes to magic, transfiguration, obviously, and I'm pretty fair in DADA, especially wards, but really, who could pay attention in history or potions when—  
Remus: I think she was asking about personality, Prongs.  
James: …I try not to answer questions like that. It seems to end up with me sleeping on the couch, for some reason. (baffled)  
Remus: (hastily hides his mouth)

Sirius: Obviously I'm generally amazing and handsome and brilliant and all that. Suppose I can be a bit…  
James: Vain?  
Peter: Mean?  
Remus: Insane? Reckless? Careless? Irresponsible?  
Sirius: (sniffs and flips his hair) _Spontaneous._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Gilderoy is totes awesomesauce at potions for realz, yo, and Albus introduces Severus to a pretty young lady. Or so one would think.
> 
>  **Notes** : the wikia claims the so-called 'Quidditch Trillenium Stadium' in Dartmoor was built for the '94 World Cup, but this was news to me and I do not take Pottermore revelations as bindingly canon. I'll keep the name, though, as it is so very JKR. I could not possibly come up with one that blended into the universe better.
> 
> Severus is making reference to Ivan the Terrible and Vlad the Impaler. He considered 'Vlander' but couldn't make himself say it, in the end.
> 
> The fail of Regulus making his claim to good instincts at the end of this particular conversation isn't lost on me, and Severus will headdesk repeatedly when he is less flustered. Can we spell 'defense mechanism,' Reg? No, I didn't think so…
> 
> I do know what those spells do and which one Reg picked, but at the time of writing I'd been hearing from readers about excessive exposition and thought there'd probably been enough in this chapter already. Since the end goal is 'the DE doesn't find out they went to do recon' in any case. (shrug)


	55. Petroc Hall, Dartmoor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gilderoy Does His Thing, Albus has an Agenda, Severus would like to go home now plzkthx, and to your _charmante_ narrator these boys are of all things the most adorable, mais oui!  
>  No OCs, I promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warning** : this chapter's narrator is an EFL speaker. And in tribute to Patricia C. Wrede. But not an OFC, really. Promise.
> 
>  **Q &A**: I forgot to give a prompt last week, possibly on the premise that mostly people are asking whatever they feel like anyway and I'm pretty much fine with that. ;) But since no prompt seems to mean no questions, your prompt this week is _daily routine_. Ask here, ask in comments on the post (link in profile), ask if you don't have a ffnet or AO3 ID... s'all good!

"…A revolutionary new potion which will do wonders for quidditch players everywhere!"

Nell nodded and smiled agreeably. She kindly didn't tell the very handsome young man with the waving golden hair, nearly purple grey eyes, and very white, strangely even teeth that his revolutionary new potion was not quite as good as one made very nearly four hundred years ago.

"Oh, god," a deep voice bit off from just behind her. "What the hell are _you_ doing here?"

Nell turned in affront, but the voice's owner only nodded civilly at her before staring at the blond in dismay again. He was just as young an Englishman, but not nearly so handsome. And just as well for all concerned that he should not be, Nell thought. In her opinion it would not be well for too many young men to go about with both charming faces and enticing voices. The new one did not sound as if he felt himself charming, which was of all things the most dangerous in a beautiful man.

This one was not beautiful, no _,_ except about the hands and eyes, and did not dress as if he thought himself beautiful, as the other in his silky lilac robes did. Nell smiled as she recognized the eccentric touches of a craftsman who had ordered his clothes made to be exactly convenient to his work, and left it to his tailor to prevent him from being pointed at in the streets. He had, as well, that dark-and-pale burning-eyed look of the poet of the sciences consumed by passions of the mind which made her smile in memory of the long-ago young man who had squeezed her orange juice that very morning.

The beautiful young man took on the appearance, for just one moment and to Nell's considerable interest, of a trapped rabbit. "Well, I—Well, fancy finding you here, Severus!" he cried jovially, his voice full of caramel and bluff. "You weren't on the guest list, were you? Couldn't keep you out, eh?"

"Not on the guest list, no," the pale young man agreed, not blinking at the insinuating tone, but his lip curling a little in cool contempt for it. "Professor Slughorn decided—at very nearly the last minute, he can be so impulsive—that the House was underrepresented. Interesting that, in choosing to come yourself, you decided to pay such careful attention to who else would be attending, I must say. So I repeat: what the—" he glanced at Nell, shrugged to himself, and continued in what was so clearly an accusation. "What _are_ you doing here? I know one doesn't need an O score to be welcomed into MESoP, but _really_."

Nell got her hand up to her mouth in time to stifle the laugh.

The beautiful young man, improbably, brightened. "Yes, it is rather beneath my talents, isn't it?"

The dark young man's very dark eyes were in danger of falling right onto the floor, Nell feared, turned from sardonic half-moons to plump, incredulous almonds. The other one, though, did not seem to notice, but launched into the same speech Nell had just been treated to.

He was cut off in the middle of it, though, as the dark and pale young man's long, thin arm shot out to snatch a vial off of his display. The stopper came out, and the vial was held to the light, swirled gently, then lowered to the so-prominent nose. Nell was impressed that such an impatient young man bothered to replace the stopper before sighing gustily, and that he had wafted the scent to him in the approved fashion instead of sniffing from the top of the vial. The young brewers were usually impatient with this step until they had learned the hard way.

"Lockhart." The deep voice sounded as though it had a headache. "The only differences between this and Robert Boyle's _Nostrum for Agility of Body and the Amelioration of Physical Ineptitude_ are you used eelskin instead of deer hooves and mucked up the cauldron temperature. The latter is why it's streaky burnt umber instead of shimmery bronze and gave you an eye-tic. The former is why you were getting godawful static electric shocks for hours after you took it. _Possibly_ different enough that the patent office at the DMLE won't come after you with large Aurors with clubs, _possibly,_ but not really what I'd call an improvement on the original."

"You—you can't know that!" the blond young man sputtered.

"If you say so," the other one told him, shrugging. "Testing the premise won't do your reputation any favors, though."

"It is true, my friend," Nell said sympathetically, looking at the very certain young man with much increased interest. "I did not like to say, me, but there are those who will recognize Monsieur Boyle's nostrum in your potion, and think you have only made a mistake in it."

"Anyway," the challenger said, looking now more perplexed than pained, "I thought you were writing a book. Reg said it was hil—wasn't shaping up badly."

"I _am_ writing a book!" the beautiful one sniffed, drawing up his dignity around him. "I can do more than one thing at once, you know!"

"Yes, well, possibly you shouldn't," the dark one snapped, scowling again. "This is an international convention, Lockhart. Their standards may be sh—" he glanced at Nell again and finished, "shoddy, but that's no reason to encourage them."

She stifled another laugh. It was a complaint she had so often heard from her husband, and it was always so charming when the young men tried so hard to use the unfamiliar manners of the last century for an unknown lady. They did not know, perhaps, how modern an idea it was that more than the most comfortable of classes should be held strictly to these manners, or how poorly that idea had ever taken hold.

The young man slid her a tiny piece of a smile, somewhat abashed, but then turned back to his countryman again, not unsympathetic but certainly uncompromising. "Get out of here, will you? Before someone else notices you giving Hogwarts a bad name. Because, Lockhart, if you won't leave on your own, I'm going to have to have you ejected myself. The _last_ thing the House needs in times like these is a _confirmable_ reputation for plagiarism and snake oil."

The beautiful one flushed, and for a moment Nell thought he was going to become very ugly indeed. But he tried, "But, Severus, we were at school together!"

"Yes," the other one said with strained patience, "which is why I'm giving you the opportunity to leave on your own. I'd really rather just have you thrown out on your—ear. This is heinous even for you, you know."

Nell wasn't sure whether she thought the blond young man hadn't understood that word or was choosing not to care about it. In either case, he brightened in that odd way again, and took on the same insinuating, syrupy tone he'd had before. "You want to watch me being manhandled, Severus?" he purred.

The very pale young man's very dark eyebrow slid up sardonically. "Oh, god, yes," he enunciated. Rather than being flustered, intimidated, or aroused, as Nell would have expected and the golden youth perhaps intended, he seemed vastly entertained. Clearly, Nell thought, they had known each other for a long time, or at least one of them had.

"I'm sorry, Severus," the beautiful young man said, with apparently genuine sympathy. "I have a boyfriend, you know."

In Nell's opinion, he deserved to be slapped for this whether the certain one cared about having been briefly led on or not.

It was 'not.' The thin mouth was quivering slightly, not with disappointment or humiliation, as it solemnly said, "I do know, and I would feel very, very sorry about that if he didn't so thoroughly deserve it."

The beautiful young man looked as though this had been said to him in Greek, or perhaps Urdu, but the pale one gave him no time to either understand or to find a compliment in it. In a businesslike tone, he said, "Packed up in five minutes, Lockhart, and out of the hall in ten, or I _will_ send the docents after you, do not imagine for a _moment_ that I won't. And do, please, remember that some people's locating charms work?"

He nodded civilly to Nell again, turned on his heel, and strode off for another table. This one seemed to impress him more. Nell decided to slip away as well; the beautiful young man would perhaps not wish a witness to his own slipping away, or he might attempt to use her in a so-tedious attempt to save face.

She thought for a moment of following the certain Englishman to see what would impress someone so young who could recognize by sight and smell so old a potion whose inventor had not thought much of it or made it famous, even when made badly. In truth, though, she had not come because she was herself so very interested in potions. To her husband they were of all things the most interesting, or nearly so, and so over the years Nell had come to know many people, often so strange and amusing, who thought as he did.

She had come in the main to see these friends, and because there were always new people to meet. And just when one thought no one was as amusing and eccentric as the men of one's youth, _alors!_ Here were new ones. And now it was even permitted at times for women to be successful and eccentric outside of the realms of hospitality, which was a new delight.

Of course, there was this as well to be said about potions conventions: the food was always wonderful. Her husband belonged to all of the major guilds, and so she knew. For example, the food was wonderful at _Huángdì Yījì_ events, but in this case it was because they were eager to make sure that not too many of the foreign brewers became so drunk during the never-ending toasts as to die.

And then, at the events held both by IAMB and the North American Brewers' Union, there was a general feeling that 'food' was a nutritional potion that one could endlessly experiment with because it was so unlikely to explode. Brewers were generally eager to share recipes, proud of their cultures' food and their own innovations, and while the _IAMB_ invitations, at least, did not explicitly have the words 'pot luck' on them and the IAMB events did have some catering, that catering largely consisted of the Guildhall's city's local wine, fruit chocolate, bread, and goat milk cheeses. Those who showed up with only their potions and were not very new were solicitously asked if they had been in a broom accident on the way.

The Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers, on the other hand, simply liked to eat and be comfortable. Their members who considered themselves primarily members of other brewing guilds and had joined only to be sure of not missing anything sometimes rolled their eyes about this, especially the German ones, but Nell was not rolling her eyes.

But no! She felt it was of all things the most pleasant to stroll with friends nibbling her way through a great hall of cool stone and interesting things, with tall walls supported in the old cathedral style by arching columns like trees, reaching up into a ceiling that faded into the sky, even if the food was not so original.

These English and their sky-ceiling charms! She was very fond of them, although she would not wish to live under one, as some of them did. She thought, her, that she would worry about birds, and it would not be so nice on a grey day, or in the rain. And they had so many grey and rainy skies in England, so many mists, compared to her home. But to walk under on such a beautiful day, yes, with people cheerfully arguing their passions all around her, and old friends to run into all the time, it was a wonderful way to spend a morning.

And, bah, the Germanics and the sterner Englishmen could scoff if they liked! Nell did not see anything so very terrible in having as many little tables, piled with tea and scones and biscuits, crepes and wine, bread and cheese and fruit, tender sausages and ale and little globes and anise laceworks of pancakes covered in powdered sugar to eat as one walked, as card tables groaning with smelly potions. Neither was there anything wrong with great squashy couches surrounded in air-filtering charms up against the wall to retire into. Why should everyone be uncomfortable to speak to each other? If the food had all been made by elves, well, the elves were very good at what they did, were they not, and they were so happy to do it and to see that all their hard work was eaten.

And if it meant that Nell was not obliged to make four hundred crepes suzette herself and put them under heating and stasis charms, so much the better! She would so much like to know who had first told all of her husbands' friends that she made them better than anyone. If they were still alive, she would so enjoy making them wish they were not. Crepes were such tedious work, especially in summer, even with magic. It would have been a thousand times better to be known for the recipe she had learned from her old friend Abraham and his wife, the one that was like blintzes only made all in one pan and so very nearly no fuss at all.

Nell had been helping her husband in the stillroom long enough (more than long enough!) that she could hold her own with very nearly any wild-eyed brewer or expansive potioneer who wanted to wanted to jabber at her about the latest new thing (which so often had been done more gracefully by the Greeks or Egyptians). It was more restful, however, she felt, to drift about with the other spouses and _petit amis_ too devoted or weak-willed to remain at home. The stories were much more amusing!

One could at other times get the brewers themselves to tell the stories of the failures and what happened to the walls afterwards, yes, but not at such a public event. Only the most confident and well-established of professionals would risk a story anyone else thought was funny at a convention.

"It turned out to have an unexpectedly low combustion point, alas," she heard a familiar merry tenor. This voice was beginning to be called quavery by its detractors, but in truth was not much changed. It had always simply been used with enough air and whimsy to counteract the natural scratchy quality that became all earthy growl in its brother. "But a golden lining to every cloud: I barely had to take a rag to the oven afterwards and it was positively spotless!"

"Albus!" Nell cried in delight, abandoning her passel of gossips to float effortlessly through the appreciative laughter.

His sharp blue eyes caught her at once, and he beamed and extracted himself. Although it was ever a sorrow to see a beautiful young man become old, Albus was one of those who was more graceful in age than he had been in the burning fretfulness of his prime, his eyes only brightened by a waterfall of hair and beard the crystal-white of his name, his movements only become quicker and more sure.

It was a true thing in the heart, as well, that there was something beautiful when someone who had once been concerned with presenting himself well, so as to make others think well enough of him to listen, learned to wear exactly what he liked, and surrounded himself with the bright colors and gaiety his sober country of fogs was so shocked by.

Yet, in Albus's case, this was a beautiful thing only in the heart. To the eyes, enh, Nell preferred to look only at his face.

It was, however, amusing to think what his great sweeping robes would have cost if, rather than having the colors charmed into the cloth and thread, they had been dyed in the old muggle way, with saffron or turmeric on those shining ropey borders (such a shade could not have been done with onionskin). And such decorations, reedy river-grasses sweeping up the front, and frog-closings, and sweeping acanthus leaves over the breastplate of his underrobe!

She wondered if he had taken to ordering this grand work of his wardrobe from an artisan, or if he was doing it himself. Such a great and old building as Hogwarts would need constant maintenance work, and lanomancy was one of the best ways to secure stonework and lay long-lasting wards. Nell had thought, though, that her old friend enjoyed knitting and not embroidery for his knot-magic.

They sailed blithely through the crowds, Nell letting Albus steer her by slow degrees wherever it was he wanted to lead her to, because why not? And there would be something. She was sure he was honestly happy to be spending the time with her, but yes, and yet Albus thought himself a busy and important man these days. Perhaps it was even so!

But yes, there would be something, it was not a thing in question. And he would be so very pleased with himself, would he not, that he had been able to wait for her to find him instead of going looking for her, so that it looked natural and he did not have to come as a suppliant. These boys, they were all the same in the core.

Nell had that thought, and yet Albus managed to surprise her, and not even in some tedious or shocking way! No, it was that when he began to slow and seem pleased with himself it was, rather than near some portly guildmeister or whiskery senior mugwump, as they approached one of the young research brewers' demonstration table.

It had drawn more of a crowd than some. Nell laughed into her fingertips as they approached, because as soon as she heard the impatient voice of the very brisk young man from earlier, she knew that no matter the quality of his potion, what the crowd was there for was a show.

" _No,_ you can't _try_ it," he was saying, sounding quite at the end of his patience. "Livia beata. —I mean go ahead try it if you insist, no skin off my nose—"

Some stifled merriment from the crowd there.

"—but it won't do anyone any good in this moon-phase and it's quite toxic orally to uninfected humans. No, really, go on, shall I pour you a measure?" The deep voice was positively dripping helpfulness, and Nell did not have to see through all the heads in front of her to see his curled lip.

"So you have to take it at the right time of month to be protected?" someone asked. They seemed, to Nell's astonishment, to be in earnest, and not poking fun at the young man at all.

"It's not a _vaccine,_ " the brewer said crossly. She thought he was as irritated at the fact as the question, but was not sure until he had gone on, " _Christ_ butwe wish it was. It stops the rage and the anthropophagous cravings, allows them to keep their sanity, but it's not a cure and it's sure as hell not a prophylactic. Either of those is a long way off yet."

"You won't make any sales with an attitude like that, boyo," someone called. She had the tone of someone trying to be helpful to someone she did not particularly like, that she might go on considering herself a kind person.

"Then thank Merlin I'm a brewer, not a salesman," the young man replied dryly. This was well received, with amusement from some (it was so clearly the case!) and hear-hears from others.

Although this was less the case in MESoP than other potions guilds, it was of all things the most common for the research people to be baffled and resentful over having to explain to others why those things they thought amazing should be bought and supported. The guilds had formed in the first place to stop unscrupulous agents from taking advantage of the excited stillroom mice who thought they did not care about money until they found themselves in difficulties.

"My problem isn't sales," he told the witch. "This is the kind of thing that's better suited to government than commercial contracts—at least in its current formulation it's too damn much trouble for individual sales, or for anyone in the business of profit to bother with. But whether it's for reasons of security, humanitarianism, or just," he waved a cynical hand, "werewolves voting, and paying taxes _if_ they can hold a job, like everyone else, governments are going to want this. _My_ government wants it.

"That's our problem," he went on soberly. "They want it badly enough that they're rushing R&D. They might decide it's finished _next month_ , and it's nowhere near finished. Werewolves who feel like they have a choice mostly won't take the stuff, and anyone who tries to force it on them is going to have real problems."

Nell listened to him talk—and talk—and talk—and answer questions—and more questions. After a time he began to repeat himself, because the crowd had replaced all its original members and the new ones were asking questions whose answers Nell had already heard. The young man seemed to have been prepared for this, and it was the cost of being successful at one of the tables, before one had earned the right to do a stage presentation. While he was keeping his temper, however, it was clearly preying on his nerves, _le pauvre_.

Nell, too, was growing impatient. It was interesting, but yes! And she had therefore listened carefully, and had no need to hear everything twice. She caught Albus's eye and showed him her feelings under an unwavering smile.

Albus was a good boy, beneath it all, and he, too, did not need telling twice. He raised his arm and cried out gaily, "Ah, Severus, there you are!"

The young man stopped dead in the middle of a sentence. His peculiarly dark eyes were peculiarly flat, and Nell could see a cord throbbing in his throat under his so-old-fashioned cravat—ah, well, perhaps it was not so old-fashioned as all that; an unstarched thing of dark silk, even in a low mailcoach style as he wore it, would have been all the horror in Society until not so long ago.

Well, he had the throat for it, and the cord did not seem to her to be throbbing in anger but in a prayer for patience. Nell was not so ill-mannered as to try to find out his thoughts simply for the sake of her curiosity, no! But if she were to guess, ah, she would say that the cord was wishing very much to be saying out loud, _Professor,_ (for surely Albus had been those young Englishmen's Headmaster until quite recently), _is it possible in your mind that so tall a person as you are, dressed so brightly, can have gone unnoticed by a person who is facing you and, naturally, is not color-blind, as, if I were, then the potions, they would so often explode in my face?_

But it seemed that when he was not dealing with such persons as the beautiful blond who had done sad things to M. Boyle's formula, the young man was more polite than that. He spoke instead to everyone else, excusing himself so that he might speak to his old professor and perhaps visit some of their own exhibits, which had looked so interesting, for a time, and closed down his table. The samples, Nell was pleased to see, came with him. There was always some young fool at a convention who would try to drink something they ought not to.

When he joined them, however, he said with a pained severity, "Headmaster, that was _not subtle_. Everyone and their pet toads could see you standing there listening to the Q &A for the last ten minutes. You rather stand out." Then he noticed Nell, and finished, expressing in one syllable his awareness that she had now twice caught him laying down the law as though he had a right to, and now to his elder, "Er."

She laughed into her hand and his eyes as he flushed and Albus said merrily, "Oh, I think I should leave subtlety to you, Severus."

"Oh, god," the young man groaned faintly. "Doomed, doomed, we're all _doomed_. Tell me you didn't put Professor Slughorn up to this. …I mean Professor Flitwick. Tell me at least you _only pull one person's strings at a time_."

"I can't say that sounds very efficient," Albus protested mildly. "But I'm sure I haven't the least idea," he finished airily, "what you mean."

The young man made an anguished noise like a deflating tuba.

"Come," said Albus, all cheer and assuredness that he would win, the dreadful and darling brat of a man, "let's go outside. It's awfully stuffy in here, isn't it? I'd like to introduce you to someone."

The young man looked around the massive hall—no one was even standing near them anymore—and up at the high ceiling, which was showing clouds and blue sky and favoring them with a very gentle charmed breeze smelling of phlox and clematis. He looked at Nell, half in appeal and half in suspicion. She smiled, but also shrugged; Albus was Albus, what was one to do?

His shoulders sagged. Rebelliously, he grumbled to himself, as they followed Albus's victorious back, "Am I going to want Evan for this conversation? Of _course_ I am. But nooooo, he's off god-knows-where painting pestilential ponies prancing around in quicksand…"

"Is that your _petit ami_?" she asked him with interest, smiling because he had glowered sheets of ice at young Master Steingelt until the great ox had thought better of getting in Nell's way.

At first, from his expression, she thought he would lie, or say yes and resent her for making him admit it. But he eyed her again, and pursed his mouth. What came out of it was a very sadly accented French, but although that flaw was the fatal one to most of Nell's countrymen, his use of her language had no other. And he was, she thought, using it for privacy, rather than to impress. Indeed, he had the look of someone who knew what Parisians thought of langue-manglers and expected to be hit with her handbag.

What he said was, "Mademoiselle, although he himself would enjoy and encourage the phrase, I cannot permit for such a man and partner a term which is such a diminishment."

And still he looked as if he expected her to hex him! It was of all things the most adorable, and she told him so, and he turned very nearly a shade which was not so sallow, and scowled at her.

"But," she added, scolding lightly because she knew all about young men and their tender hearts, "my friend, that accent!"

"I know," he agreed dolefully—in English, thankfully, and seeming very grateful.

"Would your _great_ friend," she asked, teasing, "protect you, then, from M. Albus's terrible charm?"

He grinned, showing just for a moment, before he pulled his mouth back into shape, that his teeth were rather crooked. "Oh, yes," he assured her, eyes dancing. "You and I, we could just sit back and watch."

She chatted with him about his young man's art while Albus led them around in a meandering fashion, ostensibly looking for a satisfactory place to talk. It would be most rude to ask him about himself before they were introduced, when Albus so clearly had something in mind. It seemed that his _(great)_ friend had spent time in many places that Nell had lived in, over the years, although he himself had very few times been out of England for longer than it took to gather a basket of berries or hoof shavings.

"But you should go!" she exclaimed. "And, my friend, you should see the world soon, for it is becoming smaller all the time. These muggles, they don't know how to have convenience and tradition at the same time, _n'est çe pas_? Before so long it will be every place the same, and they will sell their hamburgers on _La Riviera_ and your, bah, Weetabix in the Marrakesh souk."

He eyed her again, mouth twitching, and said, "One rather suspects they have more respect for flavor than that in the Marrakesh souk; hot places that value meat tend to be strong on spices. Ovaltine, maybe. Malt, though on the shy side, makes friends easily once introduced… No, I know what you mean. When I have been off the Isles, though, I don't know… it doesn't feel right."

"But you must embrace these new smells!" she cheered him on. "And such beautiful—"

"No, it's not that," he disagreed. "Those are interesting, yes, and the architecture, and the _flora,_ " he ended on a sudden enthusiastic surge. "And the spice markets and souks and the Mǎliándào were certainly a better time and smelled better than any British apothecary I've been in. Have you ever had red clover tea? It's pink. They practically _forced_ it on me," he added in a long-suffering tone. "Said it was good for the complexion."

"You enjoyed the haggling," she accused him, smiling into her fingers.

"I did," he agreed, unashamed. "They don't respect you if you don't, anyway, and there's a stiff fee for contempt. No, it isn't anything like that… I think it's the ley lines. Other places just don't feel like I ought to be there. Ireland's worse than Switzerland, though," he said thoughtfully. "A lot worse. Although I suppose I might just have been too busy to notice."

"On the subject of being too busy to notice things," Albus interjected gently, smiling at them from the green and yellow lawn chair he had created for himself, "I'm delighted you're getting on." He was in the sun, but very close to the shadow of an oak tree.

They settled, Nell also in the sun, in a creamy wicker armchair, and the young man in the sun-and-shade lattice that came through the leaves. Rather than simply conjuring a chair into existence, he had driven a twig into the ground, and then charmed it so that the bark fell off and it formed into a smoothly curving, low-backed wooden seat that became shiny in a way that looked like varnish. Nell wondered whether this was a matter of preferring to leave something permanent for others to sit on or because he did not know how to conjure things. He seemed not at all self-conscious or awkward in it, as one might who could not do what others had. But then, they were taught young, some of these English, to be so sadly self-possessed.

Albus had to ask twice if they still needed to be introduced to each other. This probably, Nell thought, had something to do with the expression on the young man's face that, while restrained, declared very clearly that he had not needed to see for himself that the hair on Albus's feet had gone as white as his beard. When he had recovered his eyes and ceased to look so aghast, he said, "I don't know the lady's name, but she's heard mine once or twice today."

"Ah," Nell smiled at him, "but it is not the same, no? As to be introduced."

This won her the most sardonic look she had seen in several years, and a fluid, fluting gesture that was so easily read as _if it gives the two of you any pleasure to be the silliest and most old-fashioned articles under the sun, why, far be it from me to get in your way_ that she did not even have to look at his eyes to understand it.

"Well, then," Albus said, wiggling his bare pink toes comfortably. Nell was glad for him, that he had no arthritis. "Allow me, Madame, to present to you my student, Severus Snape."

Who had frowned when Albus addressed her, and looked at her hands. She smiled, and displayed her wedding ring. That seemed to clear matters up for him, but only for a moment, for he did a very nearly subtle double-take and tried to sneak another look at it. She supposed it would look more like an engagement ring to him, if any sort of meaningful ring at all. Plain bands were all the style lately.

Albus went on, making the young man jerk so hard he nearly fell off his seat, and scowl apprehensively. "Severus is a natural Occlumens, and to be perfectly frank—"

"Oh, _see_ if you can," the boy growled. Somehow, although it was most certainly a growl, he had managed to make it silky. Nell tried not to smile when he was so angry, but it was so very much a sound that belonged on a stage. Or in the new Muggle _cinéma_ stories, now that they had sound.

"He isn't," Albus went on, sailing over his student's ire, "the sort of student to whom I'll know how to teach more than the basics until he's advanced enough to refine his technique against an assault more or less on his own. You'll recall my own area of natural talent was in the other direction," he added, with an air of philosophy that would perhaps have passed for an apology with someone who did not know him.

"Vividly, you sly thing," she scolded, smiling fondly.

"'You'll recall'?" the young man repeated, beginning to sound greatly suspicious. His voice had not risen a full octave yet, but Nell thought it soon might if he carried on in this way.

"He comes at it from a direction that leaves me entirely at a loss, I must confess," Albus said airily, but she could see that he was worried about his student. "We haven't yet been able to get him to the point of emptying his mind without losing consciousness or leaving his body behind."

Nell made a sad little noise. It was not a shock that someone could be this way, but it was not foolish of Albus to be concerned. Others that she had met, it had not gone so well for them, though she had tried. She was not so eager to try again and watch another mind fall apart or drift away, especially not a clever one with something to offer.

And yet, that was what would happen in the end if no one tried, almost surely. And to feast on this gift of a life and not do her best to give what only she could, what would she deserve then?

Besides, those others, Charles and Vincent and Erzsebet and Henry and poor Eduard, they had not struck Nell in this way. Erzsebet was the closest; she had been clever, too, and fierce. Hers, though, had been the ferocity of the torch in the night, too bright and too wavering to see clearly by. Not this kind, that of the narrow-eyed stone gargoyle guarding the door, who knows its place and its purpose and may, if it thinks it right, suffer a traveller to pass safely by.

And Charles was also the closest, in another way, for this young man too was vibrant with an unceasing anxiety. She could tell, now that he was letting it show, that to be on the edge of panic was very nearly comfortable for him, he was so accustomed to it. He was one of those who was relieved once he knew what to worry about, she could see. Yet, Charles had let his fears make him silly and fanciful, had been inclined to go all to pieces and look to others for help and advice. These so-dark eyes were sharpening and becoming more and more present even as she watched.

"I am _right here,_ " the young man bit off. Nell had to stifle a smile again, because he was confirming her impression, just like that! "I can _hear you_. Being _right here_."

"So you are!" Albus agreed cheerfully. "Severus, I'd like you to meet my own teacher of mind magics—" he stopped again, in surprise.

The young man had shot to his feet, sprang up on his long legs like a deer. He was eyeing Nell with an expression that was very nearly wild, but was not—only full of suspicion and dread. "Madame," he said, and Nell wasn't sure whether he was addressing her or simply repeating Albus's word. "Ought I to compliment you on your command of youthening glamours? Please, _please_ say yes," he added, with the sort of hope that has no hope at all.

Nell smiled at him, openly and with sympathy. It seemed that to continue Albus's game was unnecessary and impossible. It was those terrible froggy cards they had, she was sure of it. "I am afraid not, my friend," she admitted. "My name is Perenelle Montmorency Flamel, and I am charmed to meet you."

Although this was true, she could see in his face the exact moment when realizing that he had behaved so casually before an old lady like her, as if she were his own age, made him decide that he wanted to die at once. He was so young a man that this was entirely expected. More interesting was the way he decided, just as a sensible woman would have, not that he did not want to but that to do so would be of all things the most irresponsible, and then became very irritated as well as ashamed. And then he vanished without moving, without warning, with a loud _crack!_

Albus blinked, and pulled out a flask. When he had poured himself a drink from the cap, he offered the flask to her. As she drank his lemonade, which but of course was too sweet, he remarked, "I think that went very well, don't you?"

"Someday, _mon abeille,_ " she shook her head at him severely, "these games of yours will upset someone enough to do something about you, I think."

She had not finished speaking before there was another _crack_ and the young man was back, his so-unfortunate hair a little mussed. There was a small streak of pale blue paint just next to his eye, only a little darker than his skin, and a larger stripe of green on the shoulder of his robe. "My apologies," he said to her and only to her, glaring daggers at Albus. "It wasn't my intention to go be somewhere else; I only wanted to." He paused, tilting his head, and added thoughtfully, "Really a lot."

"So I can see," Nell laughed, rising from her wicker chair in a rustle of white lawn. The chair vanished behind her as she took his arm. "Come, if you can be away from your display for a little longer, we will leave this terrible man behind and talk."

"Which is exactly what he wants, so you can't fool me he's punished by it," the boy said resignedly, making an awful face at Albus but no resistance. "I suppose I ought to say 'enchanted,'" he added, mouth quirking as he slid an amused look down at her, very nearly as if he still thought her a young woman, "but I'll spare you. If you speak French I'll get better, though," he finished hopefully.

"Ah, Slytherins," Albus muttered from behind them, not quite fondly but warm enough as well as rueful, and sounding as if he had his eyes closed to sunbathe.

"Anything done only for one reason," the young man who might become her student shot back at him dryly, "is, as you said, inefficient. I wait _breathlessly_ to find out what other purpose you had in pulling Professor Flitwick's strings to bring me here, Professor."

"Was that a compliment, Severus?" Albus asked, delighted.

"I believe I've told you already that I only describe the data in front of me." The young man was still annoyed with her old student, but had resigned himself into being in a better humor about it. "Take it as a compliment or an insult as you please, but don't ascribe that shading to me."

" _Sacre bleu_ ," Nell murmured, and told him, when he looked at her inquiringly, "If you mean that, my friend, I think, me, that I must teach you, if only to find out what the shield of a clockwork mind will look like."

"Smoke, _he_ says," he told her. Although not seeming offended by being called a clockwork man, he did look self-conscious, as though she had asked him to remove his shirt and he had done it. Or, if he had not been an Englishman, his trousers.

She stared, although this did not help how desperate to fidget he appeared, and complained, "But that is not fitting at all!"

Looking as though he wanted even more badly now to fidget, or perhaps to run away again, he offered, "Well, I was born under Janus. Not his day proper, but really right under. And they specifically teach us at school to have more than one," he waved his free hand a little, vaguely, "face."

"Janus," she repeated slowly. Although when she had been a girl very many people had considered astrology of all things the most telling, to her what was of note was that he considered his association with the old god significant. That he had called himself born under the Two-Faced rather than under Saturn and hadn't mentioned Capricorn although that was what most would know about an early January birthday. "And the concealing smoke, not a hard wall of any sort, and when you clear your mind, it is a complete abandonment, of one kind or another." He nodded warily. She smiled, slowly, and patted his wrist. "Take heart, my friend," she advised. "I am almost—but yes, I am sure we can, as those Americans say, work with that."

Later, when they were alone again, Albus told her very secretly that she had only until the conference was over to teach the young man to defend himself as though he was not defending himself. No longer, if she wished him to be safe and her teaching not to be wasted. Less than a week.

She did not rescind his invitation to supper, but also she did not allow Nicholas to turn the naughty boy back from a frog before dessert.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Lily is as confused as you are, and as unhappy about what's going on in this chapter as you are that it's about her. So there's that. Plus, Slytherins next time. But plot must be plotted, swish and flick and carry on...
> 
>  **Translations for Americans like me and other Aliens** : 
> 
> _Huángdì Yījì_ : (黄帝一剂): Yellow Emperor's Potions (guild). The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine, 黄帝内经, Huángdì Nèijīng, is the seminal book of Chinese medicine/herbalism.
> 
>  _Mǎliándào_ (马连道): An amazing outdoor tea market in Beijing. That's not a superlative; I've been.
> 
>  _n'est çe pas_ : Is it not so?
> 
>  _Weetabix_ : A breakfast cereal that, to those like me who haven't actually tries it, resembles palm-sized slabs of shredded wheat. Severus hasn't tried it either; it was out of his family's price range. Their breakfast tended to be made from scratch when they had any, ingredients either stolen or obtained in trade for healery-type services rendered.
> 
>  _Marrakesh souk_ : A reputedly also amazing more diverse market in Morocco to which I have not been.
> 
>  _Ovaltine_ : a malt beverage which may or may not contain chocolate. I have some in the cupboard but I use it to bake with, not as intended, so I can't tell you what it's actually like. :D
> 
>  _petit ami_ : boyfriend (lit: little friend)
> 
>  _le pauvre_ : the poor thing
> 
>  _mon abeille_ : my bee
> 
> Charles and Vincent and Erzsebet and Henry and poor Eduard: King Charles VI of France, Vincent van Gogh, Elizabeth of Bathory, Henry VI of England, and Eduard Einstein.
> 
>  **Credits** : We were boys together—or at least, I was." Gilbert & Sullivan's _Iolanthe._
> 
> The blintz casserole, here attributed to the wife of Abraham Eleazar ('Abraham the Jew'), is actually the FAR more modern creation of Gloria Kaufer Greene. It can be found either on [epicurious](http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Quick-and-Easy-Cheese-Blintz-Casserole-102014) or in the New Jewish Holiday Cookbook, and is delicious.


	56. Hospital Wing, Hogwarts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lily is as confused as you are, and as unhappy about what's going on in this chapter as you may be that it's about her. So there's that. Plus, Slytherins next time. But plots must be plotted, swish and flick and carry on...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warning** : fpreg. Gryffs. Setup. See summary. vOv
> 
>  **Q &A**: Interviews associated with this chapter can be found in [chapter 9](chapters/5525147chapters/5525147) of the Subjectiverse DVD Bonus Extras (Crucios! They're part of this complete breakfast). See: Lord Voldemort's day planner! See: Lucius's Black Hat explained! See: evidence would have obliged everyone by dying at fifty without being murdered! See: Severus and Evan have a VERY SERIOUS FIGHT OH NOES!11!1! and many, many (or at least several) more!
> 
> Question prompt for the Halloween run-up: magic.
> 
> Also, I'm behind on comment replies and apologize to those I haven't gotten to. Am prioritizing midterms, job, and actual-writing (Severus is not cooperating with the current chapter-in-progress, not that I blame him), and hope you'll understand.

Tears very nearly sprang to Lily's eyes as she and James followed Madam Pomfrey into the iced-gingerbread confection of a chapel that was the Hogwarts Hospital Wing. The Great Hall, cool and welcoming in the late July heat (still better than London) had also made her smile with its open ceiling and ribby flying buttresses, all candles and student tables stored away for the summer.

The Founders had left the Great Hall nearly bare, though. Unadorned, even, apart from the wonderful bay windows, whose latticework painted delicate shadows on the walls that Rosier had devoted cumulative hours to during prefect meetings and into which Lovegood, according to Ben Goldstein, had spent almost as many hours reading ever-changing meanings. It was, as it had presumably been meant to be, almost infinitely adaptable, and quite stark enough in its design to be as easy to clean as any room its size could be.

That was very important, given how much abuse it took even when the grounds weren't muddy and none of the students had taken it into their heads to start a hex-off, prank war, or food fight.

The Infirmary was another affair entirely. Lily hadn't gone far enough in Arithmancy to understand how its creamy arcades and parasol rib-vaulting worked, but thought it would probably have a soothing and mesmerizing effect (though less of the latter) on patients even without magic. Might even on a grey evening, with the white heavy curtains half-down and the light struggling through the drapes, turning everything it touched to glowing pools of old-lace haze. And today was a very blue and bright day, with the great, tall windows thrown open against the grass and sky to let the breeze in (although not the bugs; no mediwitch worth her wand would put up with that).

It wasn't quite like never having left. Madam Pomfrey had changed the cots again, replacing the almost hammock-looking affairs Lily remembered with white-painted wooden beds. At least, they looked like wood. If McGonagall or Flitwick had made them, they could have been anything. And, of course, she'd never seen the place this empty, heard it this silent. There was something different about the moulding at the top of the windows, too, she thought.

But it was the same Infirmary, the same Madam Pomfrey in the same kerchief and white apron. She'd spent probably months here, all put together, visiting Sev while he glowered at the floor and wouldn't talk to her and helping Madam Pomfrey when she'd been thinking about becoming a Healer.

In detentions, too, which wasn't a sour thought. Lily wasn't like Sev, who was driven so wild by having his time wasted that even doing things he quite enjoyed when they were for extra credit or his own idea became punishing as punishments. She also hadn't gotten into trouble very often, though, especially compared to other people, and so more often than not the teachers had been inclined to be lenient in assigning her detention tasks, if not detention hours. Especially when they had the idea it was really all Sev's fault, or James's, or Marlene's.

Odd to be here with James instead of Sev. By the time she'd been willing to give James the time of day, the boys had stopped squabbling, and James hadn't been getting hurt much, on or off the pitch. Not that he ever had, really. Lily knew how much damage Sev could do, when he wanted to, and so did he, which was why he never let himself. He'd gotten very, very creative and well read in order to hold his own without hurting anyone.

She'd helped him, too, in the early years. Sev was _scary_ when he felt helpless. It had taken years of him squirming away from the idea of standing up to his friends (although Rosier said those vicious bullies never been his friends… and wasn't that worse, really? Or was it?) before she'd given up believing that he wasn't what everyone said he was, but she'd always known he was the kind of wild animal that would bite when cornered.

—At least, she'd thought the boys had stopped squabbling. And she didn't, _so badly didn't_ want to believe some too-smooth, lazy-arse, drawling fop of a pretty-boy Slytherin who managed to be creepy sometimes even though he always looked one etiquette lesson away from yawning in your face and settling down in the nearest convenient armchair for a nap. Especially not over her own husband.

Only, you couldn't be friends with Sev without knowing what _guilty_ looked like, and certainly not without learning the mulish, frustrated, slightly-guilty-but-more-angry look of _goddammit, I know I'm right, not fundamentally guilty, and you're wrong, and I WOULD have done the thing I know is right and talked honestly to you if you would just consider being less than totally unreasonable so it wouldn't be a ruddy painful waste of everybody's time that wouldn't get anyone anywhere except making you this angry at me even sooner and over something I couldn't apologize for, can't apologizing for the lying be enough for you?_

And you couldn't have been anywhere near Sev's mum all the time Lily had known their family without learning to nod sympathetically at or back away fast from _my baby fights for himself, and I won't infantilize and suffocate him and make him think he can't, but DAMN do I want to kill someone_.

And Jamie had been almost convincing, but his jaw had set stubbornly, and Rosier's smile had been brittle and razor-sharp as shattered ice, and his drowsy, salvia-blue eyes had blazed like cold novas. She knew Dumbledore had been as redheaded as she was, once, and seeing that expression in Rosier's strawberry-blond had made her glad she'd never seen the Professor angry. It was more of a shock, she realized now, when the person showing temper was usually affable and breezy. Which maybe explained why Sirius was dismissive with her but so (not as secretly as he thought) easily cowed by a sharp look from Remus.

Jamie wasn't cowed, he didn't know how to do that, but he was on edge. He'd been waiting for their fight for days now, and she almost felt badly about it. They usually just shouted and threw hexes and silly charms at each other until they were tired enough to talk calmly—or worked up enough to work off the energy in more satisfying ways so that they could talk calmly when Jamie was awake again. Having to wait for the storm must be driving him mad.

Not 'must be.' She could see it was, the way he kept sneaking glances at her and starting to bounce on his feet and stopping, and messing up his hair. As if that would get her to notice him. All that was missing was a contraband snitch.

The problem was that she didn't know what to do. Yes, she could counter 'how can you believe those snakes over me' with 'because I love you and I pay attention to you so I know when you're lying.' Even if he outright admitted it, though—even if he admitted _everything_ , the old bullying and the more recent stalking, then what? What did she want to happen next?

Because neither Dumbledore nor Sev himself had acted as if (whether or not Sev himself was the good man she wanted him to be) Sev was free and clear of anything shady, had they? The way he'd bugged out in the hospital—people leading lives full of innocence just did not know things they felt were that dangerous, did they? And Dumbledore hadn't tried to convince her Sev was all sweetness and light, he'd suggested her old friend was bravely disguising himself as a monster to keep an eye on all the in-the-bone ones.

Too appealing a thought to be lightly swallowed. She couldn't have let herself consider it for a moment, if Sev hadn't sent her to Dumbledore in the first place.

Only, she _knew_ he was sneaky, and _he_ knew she would have gone to Dumbledore anyway and been safe with him no matter what he thought about Sev, she was sure. But Dumbledore hadn't seemed surprised that Sev would trust him, even though _nobody else in the world_ who knew about Sev and Hogwarts would have been less than falling-over-in-a-faint shocked about it. Of course, Dumbledore was, er, self-assured, but still…

Generally speaking, Lily didn't like any of this at all. Two weeks ago, she'd known for a fact that she couldn't trust one of the people she knew loved her most in the world, not one inch. Now she wasn't sure at all, and that was worse. She was less sure than she'd been last week that the person she loved most was, today, more the person she thought he'd grown into than who he'd been when she'd seriously disliked him.

She was also less sure that she didn't need to know what was up her often mysterious general's highly embroidered sleeve and behind his vague and reassuring twinkly smile.

She was unwieldy and uncomfortable and due to go into labor any time this or next week, whatever the cards had said. The cleverest person she'd ever met (the cleverest for sure, though not by any means the smartest or the wisest, who she did know cared about her a lot, though in a way she'd frankly never understood at all. Sev didn't exactly have normal-people feelings, as far as she could tell, which made it worse for everyone that the ones he did have were so strong) seemed to think that the when of it mattered very much. Not 'just' so that she could hold her baby and be mobile to protect him. Very much.

_Any of this at all._

Including the bit where she didn't really know why everyone had been urging her to coax Jamie into bringing her here, to Hogwarts and Madam Pomfrey. Or why Alice and Frank and two other heavily gravid couples and a couple of equally pregnant women without accompaniment (at least, they didn't look to her as if they were a couple, or waiting for anyone) she didn't know so well were waving at her from a cot at the far end of the infirmary. They looked like they didn't know why they were here either.

"Well, I think that's everyone in this group," Madam Pomfrey said, pulling a notebook out of her apron pocket and checking it against them all. "Yes, that's everyone. Why don't you two sit down with the rest, dears; this shouldn't take long but there's no reason to loom about."

James didn't confuse this with a mere suggestion and, happily, was too off-balance-but-unthreatened to go alpha gorilla about it. Lily, for her part, was quite happy to get off her swollen ankles. They sat down with the Longbottoms, and exchanged a series of mutually mystified looks. Frank looked a lot better, Lily was happy to see, although he was still wearing the kind of bandages the Healers gave you when you were supposed to be careful not to bump into things and so on. Alice must have blistered him raw to make him cooperate with that instead of nodding agreeably at the Healers and then trashing the things.

Madam Pomfrey remained standing, with the air of someone who was going to be moving again in a minute rather than someone who intended to lecture at an audience. She gave them the sort of smile that, Lily had always thought, made her look like someone had made her memorize a checklist of Things Comprising A Comforting Bedside Manner which, she felt, got in the way of looking after you. "Thank you all for coming."

"Do we get to find out why now?" asked a very good-looking Indian or Pakistani man Lily vaguely recognized. He'd been at school, she thought, a few years above hers. His presumably-wife, tucked into his arm, looked like she might be carrying twins, triplets, or possibly sacred cows, although that might just have been because her bones were so delicate.

"If you drink all your tea like a good boy," Madam Pomfrey said drily. It must have been an old reference between them, since there was no tea in evidence.

"Bah," he said airily, waving a hand. "No flavor." His definitely-wife laid three gentle fingers on his other wrist and he subsided, subtly sheepish. Lily stared in envy and awe at the woman, who winked.

Lily grinned back in frank admiration, hoping very much she was about to make a new friend who could teach her arcane magics even Tuney would want to know. The witch looked down, swallowing a smile, but her dark eyes flicked back dancingly to Lily before they settled again on the mediwitch. That settled that, then. Lily leaned happily into her own husband, who didn't yet know he was doomed.

Pressing down a real smile, Madam Pomfrey said, "Briefly: since the attack on the Orkney's, St. Mungo's has been somewhat pressed for bed space. There are concerns about its becoming overwhelmed past capacity if anything similar should happen again. So Professor Dumbledore and I have offered to let the hospital use the Hogwarts Infirmary as a ward for the summer—with the understanding that they'll have to have solved their space problem by the time term starts," she added, pursing her lips disapprovingly.

They all looked around at each other. Alice said it. "Er, no offense, Madam Pomfrey, but isn't your specialty kids after they've been born? After they've been born for a _while_?"

"Ha," Madam Pomfrey said. It wasn't in any way a snort, but it had overtones. "I am on call, and will be popping in to keep an eye on the place, but I am also largely on vacation. So do try not to have any emergencies beyond the obvious, will you, dear? The St. Mungo's midwives will be moving their things in this afternoon. If you could all refrain from going into labor today and tomorrow, we'd be obliged, as I imagine things will be somewhat fraught. There won't be any time without at least two birthing areas fully set up, though, so if anyone simply must, you needn't worry."

"Why are they moving the _midwives_ here?" James asked, sounding less baffled than as though he was looking for a corner piece of a jigsaw. "If the hospital's overrun, why not just the _new_ patients? Kids get bashed up and use temperature hexes all the time; I would have thought the infirmary would be much more prepared for frost giant victims than _babies_."

Lily thought, but didn't say, that very few kids ever used temperature hexes, as a matter of fact, much less all the time. James just thought they did because people who'd made Severus lose his temper so badly he couldn't think of a spell tended to find themselves on fire or with their feet frozen to the floor and an ice gag whether Sev actually meant for that to happen or not.

For someone whose father had been so freaked out by it, Sev had never worked very hard to train himself out of using accidental magic, preferring to fine-tune it instead. Lily had also never felt like wandless magic was a childish thing she was too old for, but hers was only a problem if you were Tuney.

Madam Pomfrey gave James a puzzled and mildly pitying smile for asking such an obvious question, and asked, "If the frost giants don't turn out to be an isolated incident, don't you think it's better to have the babies away from the sick and cursed patients? Of course St. Mungo's has an excellent record of sanitation and curse containment, but infant immune systems aren't what we expect from grown or even young witches and wizards. Until the hospital has satisfied Auror Moody, it's really just as well. Besides, the elves will be delighted," she added, with a more natural smile. "They do get bored in summer."

James, Lily noted, was giving the Pomfrey the fish-eye.

"Which reminds me," she added, either ignoring him or not noticing. She wasn't very good at faux-casual, but maybe Lily had been jaded by years of watching Sev get better at it. "Professor Dumbledore has instructed me to extend his invitation to you all to stay at the castle while you're," she gestured aimlessly, proving that obstetrics really was _not_ her area, "waiting. Those of you who prefer to stay at home will see Professor Flitwick in my office for a personal Portkey to the Infirmary."

"Do you want to stay?" James asked her uncertainly. She really, _really_ didn't; she wanted to be home, even with this strain between them.  But of course he thought he did, as Dumbledore had told her to talk up how much she missed the place and would feel safest with the old hedgehog.

She smiled at him gamely, and, since he'd evidently found something wrong with Madam Pomfrey's explanation, rhetorically asked, "How else will we find out what's going on?"

James beamed, and kissed the top of her head. "That's my girl," he told Frank and Alice proudly.

The other Order couple looked at each other, and shrugged. "All right," Alice said. "Count us in."

Lily's attention was quickly distracted from James demanding that Frank engage in some sort of intricate but terribly manly handshaking ritual of extremely manly fraternal bonding with him. It was made of quite large motions, but something quieter had caught her eye. Just beyond them, a portrait of Dilys Derwent, one of the old Headmistresses, had breathed out a gusty sigh of relief and slipped out of her frame.

Sometimes, Lily thought, she could very nearly see Sev's point. On the other hand, surely once he realized that other people being incompetent at things he cared about sometimes made life easier for him, he'd become a happier person?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : There has been quite enough amateur Quidditch for one day, thank you, and our fairest heroine requires either a nap or a soothing conversation with a mad scientist. While she wasn't after intrigue, she can certainly cope with i—HEY! You got your Gryffindor in my Slytherin!


	57. Quidditch Trillenium Stadium, Dartmoor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus cedes his title to a rabid alligator.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings** : not gender-confusion but a little blurring of wizarding-gender-role lines (ie: normally wizarding men are not considered witches unless they are actually trans (and of course are therefore witches, not wizarding men)), not because the lines are all that blurred really but because Insanity Runs In Our Family It Practically Gallops*. Also, by the end of this chapter you may think it's narrator  
> a) has triggered the Women Being Awesome tag  
> b) needs as much of a slap or shaking as any redheaded bint in the 'verse with a name that starts a letter or two before hers  
> c) all of the above  
> d) none of the above  
> e) is [also] approximately as sane as her sister, yes, I mean that one.
> 
>  **notes** : the wikia says the Trillenium was built for the World Cup. As there's nothing about that in GoF, this is is a Pottermore fact, and I have no compunction amending it to: the Trillenium was _i >renovated_ for the World Cup. Reaffirmation of policy: I'm happy to use stuff from Pottermore when possible, but I don't consider post-publication retconning canon.  
> Because of RL, I not only didn't post when I hoped to but totally let the interviews slide. Midterms culpa. Therefore the theme is still magic.
> 
> …Also because you are an incurious lot, for fantasy-readers. Come on guys, you don't want to know what your character of interest's favorite classes were? Favorite charms? What their superpowers would be, in their opinions or their friends' or SOs or if they could pick? (Other than, for Sev, temperature, flying, mind-reading… ) What their first accidental magic was? Who's actually into the Dark Arts? If a person can do a patronus? If a person actually uses magic in their life?
> 
> *Have you seen Arsenic And Old Lace? If not, alerting you to it is my apology present for missing Halloween.  
>  **Q &A**:

Narcissa kept telling herself that any day in which she learned something new about anyone she'd known forever had not been wasted. Even if the something new was probably useless and the day was utterly unpleasant.

Not that she was giving any indication of how unpleasant it was. Everyone had to love Quidditch. It was a rule.

To be demure in one's applause was, thankfully, for a witch of Narcissa's station, permissible and even laudable. One did have to applaud, however, and look as though one meant it. Having a hierarchy of adoration for teams was also mandatory. It was acceptable to choose every team after the first (one's local, although witches were allowed to claim the Harpies as a tie) based on player edibility, but one still had to keep up with the sport well enough to understand not only what was going on in the air but in the managers' offices as well.

The latter was barely any trouble, of course. Politics was politics, and business business. The product was, unless one was interested in it, largely irrelevant. No one had yet been able to get Severus to understand this, the silly lamb. At least his stupidity was useful: association with a manufacturer justly reputed to care deeply about the quality of the product always was.

Whatever else you might say about Quidditch at Hogwarts (and anyone who'd been in Slytherin in the seventies could say or snarl plenty), it hadn't been as _dull_ as it was when Lucius treated her to a game these days. Either her friends and relations had terrified her doing their very best to get themselves killed (or at least beaten to a pulp) up there, or she hadn't had to go. And when none of them had been old enough to be as idiotic as other boys, it had been enough to show up at House games.

So she and Severus had generally either taken their homework or, if Severus was in the right mood, given the Slytherin spectators a private commentary. Once, one of the prefects had pretended to take points every time someone Failed To Keep A Straight Face In Public, although of course Greengrass hadn't _really_ gone to Slughorn to actually have them docked afterwards.

Conversely, professional games were all about looking correct, looking impressed or unimpressed or disapproving in the right moments, and seeing if one could get anything socially useful done in the moments when Being Enthralled wasn't _de rigeur_.

Severus had half-heartedly suggested actually becoming interested. At least he'd had the grace to show that he knew she would have done that years ago if it had been at all possible. And that his own interest in the game as a spectator sport extended exactly as far as keeping track of the Slytherin and Sherwood games and injuries, period, the end.

Professional games lacked charm, conviviality, and companionship (because her husband really did care, very much, and though he didn't shout like a hooligan he was nearly always thoroughly engrossed, barely remembering she was there until the pitch had stopped sucking up his excitement and it needed another outlet), and this was worse.

There were _kiosks selling candyfloss_ and it was _all Lucius's fault_.

Worse, Regulus and Lucius were both flying (though at least this was a far more lighthearted event than House games and most of the Beaters weren't in such good shape as teenagers kept in training. Though, in her admittedly partial opinion Lucius very nearly was, and Reggie practically was a teenager still), and Evan was so solidly glued to his canvases that he was barely humming in reply when she tried to speak to him. His brushes were darting like angry bees, which they certainly hadn't done when he'd painted her. If he hadn't been a perfectly competent Slytherin she would have been making bets with herself over whether his eyes would fall out of his head before he burst into tears of sheer overloaded artistic passion.

It was ridiculous. The stadium was on the run-down side and he already had a painting or two of it empty (drab, tedious, littered, echoing things, full of, as Severus had put it, the ghosts of ghosts of flyers, the skin-crawling silence where cheering crowds should be, and the tragedy of earth trampled bare exposed, stripped of the celebrant feet that might make the massacre of grass worthwhile… but that was Severus for you), and the people weren't exactly what she'd call dressed nicely. But Evan had gone very quietly wild.

She'd seen him paint many times, but she'd never seen him like this. It explained why he and the Naj understood each other, maybe. His eyes were so wide, glued on first this subject and then that, that he looked just _creepily_ like Severus on the third all-nighter of a research-and-coffee jag.

Only, more like a more-or-less grown-up Cupid and less like the Grim Reaper, of course. But a Cupid that had taken something dreadful adulterated with something worse and hadn't slept for a week and was seeing wild things that might eat the cupid-wings they'd taken hostage if he didn't get them down in paint _at once_. Whereas Severus in that state didn't make a particularly grim Reaper, only a very worryingly, manically fixated one. Often rather cheerful, actually, for him.

(Horrifyingly cheerful. She Had Never walked in on him once brewing _very disturbingly bouncily_ to what he didn't refer to as music, at least in front of her. The noise Had Not Been so loud that she couldn't quite tell, but she Didn't Think he might Not Have Been _singing along_. By mutually horrified unspoken agreement, this had Definitely Never Happened.)

She was going to have to risk finding he'd crept off to go play fiendishly with his pots and knives in private like a gleeful child again, because she couldn't find him at all in the stands. It was very odd. She'd thought for sure he'd be playing, since Reggie was.

At school, he'd only been a reserve Chaser because, as he'd repeatedly explained to the Captain before Evan, the main team met too often. He'd been taking ten classes, for most of which he couldn't seem to stop himself from doing more homework than had been actually assigned. They'd also all considered it wise that he not be firmly committed to playing every time there was a game against Gryffindor, although he generally had anyway. Nonetheless, they'd had to sit on him in seventh year to stop him risking his NEWTs to be a Bludger-sponge so Reg could look for the snitch in relative peace. Apparently, though, today he wasn't even watching.

And this had been his idea in the first place! Oh, Lucius had tried to take _all_ the credit and she'd behaved as though she believed him—because why not if it made him happy, the absurd, insecure darling, and Severus probably wouldn't care even if he didn't expect her to know—but she'd been _right there_ when Severus had pulled Lucius aside to plot with after they'd pried Evan off his quaint and rather filthy stone bridge.

Not that she didn't approve. Really, for Severus, it was reasonably canny, and she was inclined to be a bit proud of him. It was anyone's guess what he meant to accomplish, (other than a bit of fun and/or building goodwill and exposure for Evan's work, of course), but since he wasn't anywhere to be found there probably was something, so well done Naj.

She'd been skeptical at first. It hadn't seemed the most natural idea, that a lot of mostly old, mostly fat brewers would be in favor of rearranging their schedule to have a day of tourney Quidditch, even with a third of the prize money to go to the Society or the town's coffers and a third to go to whatever charity the winning team agreed on.

It _was_ true that Ravenclaw had always been nearly as enthusiastic as the other Houses. Her suspicion, though, had been that they'd simply been miffed that a ball game could upset the point balance they earned through good behavior and academic dullness. They way they called Gryffindor and Hufflepuff the Jockstrap Houses under their breaths had rather bolstered her in this opinion.

Still, they had taken the game seriously, and the potioneers were taking it seriously now. The ones who hadn't joined teams themselves were cheering their colleagues and friends and family members most heartily. There was an unusual bit, though; although there was as much booing and hissing during the games as always, afterwards the MESoP collective and the local Dartmoor witches and wizards applauded each other's teams very politely. That really wasn't the thing, in Quidditch, but she supposed it made sense between a host and guest community.

The noise was making Narcissa's head hurt. The sun might have done so on its own if she hadn't been perfectly competent with shading and cooling charms, but there was nothing one could do, really, about the noise of a crowd, not without being foolish (and dulling one's hearing was foolish), or about the tone of a gathering being garish, inappropriate, and dissonant.

Altogether, she considered, she had smiled and clapped long enough. Lucius and Reggie's team was in no danger of being defeated in any upcoming match, and she could slip away for an hour or two. She would find Severus and have a talk, either sensible or differently and delightfully nonsensical. Alternately, she might borrow his room key and have a bit of a lie-down before going back. Either would leave her rested, fresh, and ready to smile with genuine pleasure and pride when her husband and youngest cousin wanted to preen at her, rather than gritting her teeth and forcing it.

Of course, she might still have to force it when her _second-_ youngest cousin wanted to preen at her. But that was entirely his own fault for choosing to paint proles in face paint with greasy fair-food stains down their clothes.

Anyway, Severus would undoubtedly be all drinking-chocolate eyes and possessive hands as he sniped and sniffed and drawled about exactly the things Narcissa would try very hard to hold her tongue about, so Evan had nothing to complain of.

And probably wouldn't, the ridiculous boy. He might not even _notice_ Narcissa Holding Her Tongue, once Severus got going.

Really, she'd never tell him so, but Evvie could be just like Bella sometimes. Terrible tunnel vision, for an artist, in her opinion, although it wasn't nearly as disturbing as with Bella. After all, he had a sense of humor about it (because, unlike Bella, he knew) and Severus was disturbed and perplexed over the whole affair rather than smug and inclined to take it as his due.

And there wasn't anyone left out. Narcissa was worried about Rodolphus, even though he seemed happy enough for the moment and Severus, who was always worried about everything, wasn't.

The question was where the dratted boy had taken himself off to. _Some_ people who were deluded enough to think themselves half-blooded (she'd stopped arguing years and years ago, but _really!_ ), or were utter flamboyant disgraces who had apparently been born to look good in red and cause their families pain, unfairly had enough native magical reserves that a point-me spell might have worked for them anywhere within the town limits. She wasn't quite that powerful herself, and so far all she'd been able to determine was that Severus definitely wasn't anywhere in the stadium.

The next logical place to try was, since it was Severus that she was looking for, the convention hall. This was, in fact, where she found him, but only after she'd tried his hotel. After all, it was quite a large hall, with not only the ballrooms where he and the other young researchers had their tables set up and the auditoriums but scads of conference rooms, three floors of library, and a few labs.

Whereas if he'd been in his room, at worst he would have been asleep or in the bath. Improper to disturb a man of no formal relationship to her there, of course, but if Severus wanted to be stupid about formalities and vex Evvie's heart out refusing to marry him, any resulting tedium was his own silly fault.

As she would, if necessary, make excruciatingly clear. And in fact might, if he kept on being so clumsily selfish too very much longer. One could make some allowances for crippling modesty, but there was no excuse for letting it make a fool of you, let alone of people who were truly being extremely patient with you. There were, after all, such things as personal responsibility and not looking like a complete imbecile of no breeding or perception when Slytherin had been so gracious as to permit you to graduate in one piece, upright, and breathing, somewhat against its better judgment.

It really was the worst, though, because not only was he in that labyrinth of a convention hall, but in a lab. Doing probably-smelly things. As she approached the room she could see through the window that the air was tinted a faintly glowing green. She of course didn't stamp her foot as she might have as a child, or even pout. She did, though, rather feel her eyebrows and nose wanting to twitch into positions that would encourage lines.

She had not in fact dropped Potions after her OWLs. Slughorn had gone on making Severus and the Evans heifer work together even after they'd stopped speaking, since he preferred to have them doing astonishing things to spite/impress each other rather than helping anyone who was struggling. You didn't just abandon your family to poisonous situations like that.

Or even just abandon your obsessive-compulsive lunatic perfectionist allies to NEWT fever in their pet subject. That would mean they'd only have _one_ good set of notes for you to check yourself on. In any case, it wasn't clever to assume someone would always be available to brew for you simply because you had every intention of making them do it whenever they were.

However, he twitched just adorably when she talked about brewing as if it was mucking about in a swamp, as if he wanted to snarl and grump and wail at her plaintively and crawl into bed with the covers over his head in a depressive sulk all at the same time, so she simply couldn't _resist_ making it a habit. The fact that he didn't twitch that way at people he didn't trust to like him either was quite beside or was the entire point, or more likely both at once.

So her tolerance for the intermediate stages of his craft was a great deal higher than she liked to pretend to him that it was. All the same… it looked _awfully_ green and smelly in there. And she did have a headache. She peered into the window and decided that he looked thoroughly engrossed, quite like someone who'd still be enraptured by what he was doing and certainly in the same room long after she'd had a draught for her head and a nice leisurely cup of mint tea to wash it down with.

When she got back from doing that, though, he was no longer alone.

It took a moment for her to recognize their old Headmaster. He was wearing purple, as he often did (it being the only color besides pink and rainbow that didn't align with one of the Houses even if you squinted), but it was so nearly black and the embroidery was so tasteful and subtle that he didn't look in the least like himself.

(This was not to say that it was _actually_ tasteful or subtle. It was only sufficiently so as to look if it hadn't come from his wardrobe.)

His hair was wrong, too, braided very nearly efficiently in back and tossed around his shoulders like a shimmering, fashionable scarf. It couldn't possibly have been anyone else, though: no one else was so old and tall and unbent and fit all at once, or stood with that unassuming, casual power one could feel right through a wall. Let alone both.

Severus, she saw through the window, had stopped poking at his creepy green potion and was looking thoroughly unnerved under his bland face. Although part of that might have been the glow from the potion turning his face even more cheese-colored than it usually was, poor thing—no, not poor thing! She kept forgetting: that was his own doing, the wretch!

This probably wasn't, though. Dumbledore taking it into his head to pretend to be respectable would unnerve everyone.

So Narcissa was so far from blaming her friend for his sad lack of discipline that she checked carefully for observers and then put on that very useful chameleon spell Lupin had alerted Evan to. Running her wand very lightly over (and not on) the wall, she studied the privacy spells carefully. The most obvious weak spot was a trap, but there were places in the web of wards she thought really were comparatively vulnerable. At least, vulnerable to the sorts of monitoring spells one learned from one's mother in bridal training and decidedly not at Hogwarts.

She supposed she ought to teach them to Severus, since his mother was worlds worse than useless. It was an excellent way of shoving a reluctant bride to the alter, Mama had said: simply move from training to the arrangements and before they know it, it's all gone too far to turn back. Not that Narcissa had needed to be managed (she thought, although of course delicacy was the trademark of the Rosiers and Narcissa was Mama's youngest), or that Severus wasn't fully capable of raising a colossal stink and putting his foot down even when everything _had_ gone too far. But it was something to keep in mind for once they'd figured out what on earth his real objection was and had begun to deflate it (it was bound to be silly).

Disappearing in the middle of the corridor had been, by her standards, sloppy, but all the little tells under Severus's nonexpression had told her that haste might be warranted. He was a paranoid thing, of course, but really she would have expected him to react to Dumbledore looking like a reputable wizard with more eyebrow and less terror.

Of course, when it came to Severus and terror, one had to take into consideration that the boy was not normal and ought long since to have been locked away in a garret to be tended by soothing house elves forever for his own good.

For example, just now it was very clear that only a decade of hard-won Slytherin discipline was preventing him from accidentally setting the Headmaster's unusually tasteful hat on fire with the force of his glare. It had taken him _months_ of being kicked below the table and having his feet stepped on and his skinny arm pinched, back in their first year, as well as being hexed by less restrained and older students, before he'd learned to reliably stop doing that, and breaking random things in the area, and so on, and so on.

Or perhaps it had been more a matter of becoming accustomed to using his wand. He wouldn't have been alone in that; everyone's accidental magic had settled down over their first term. It had only been most obvious with Severus, between his temper and everyone poking at it (intentionally or otherwise) and the residency in a muggle-infested dump which had prevented him from learning to use a wand before school like everyone else.

Evvie hadn't been interested in much outside his homework and sketch books that year, and his unintended magic had in any case tended not to do anything more dramatic than kill or deepen shadows and brighten torches (and, before school, summon the biscuit jar). After him, the least obvious had probably been Avery. Avery had never been angry or afraid that Narcissa had noticed, or curious or imaginative about anything outside of a witch's robes. He'd had Mulciber to make his excitement for him.

Narcissa suspected that they'd all had a very near miss with Evan on that front. Evvie had been bound to realize he needed someone with passions at _some_ point, since he couldn't get any started on his own. If he hadn't attached himself to a hopeless marshmallow like their cobra …

Of course, Severus was only hopeless once he'd been confused into thinking fighting was off the table. It only seemed like he was always hopeless to Narcissa, she was aware, because he'd gotten quite good at keeping his fights away from her. From all the girls, really, apart from the filth-veined sow.

Right now, it seemed Dumbledore hadn't managed to convince Severus fighting against whatever plot he had running wasn't an option. Either that or he was being long-term strategic, allowing her friend to argue and push back now so that he'd only feel defeated and not manipulated when the old wizard had won (Narcissa assumed that Dumbledore would assume his own victory).

She was looking forward to finding out which it was. Unlike Severus and that disgrace Sirius, who'd both been dragged in and out of his office so often they ought to have been given keys, she hadn't spent nearly enough time speaking with her old Headmaster to really get his measure. One heard all sorts of rumors, of course, but rumor was as unreliable a source of understanding as public behavior.

He had Severus's hackles well and truly up now, which was either moderately stupid or very clever of him. Severus's stubborn chin was in full-on mule position, and if his eyes weren't sparking knives of angry suspicion it was because they were full of back-against-the-wall wariness instead, with no promises to distrust, only a known opponent to be careful of.

The sentence that Narcissa's monitoring spell had flicked on in the middle of had almost certainly been, "[I don't] owe you anything." Narcissa almost couldn't help smiling at it, because this was said in exactly the scornfully dismissive tone Severus had always used at school before everyone had learned it was useless to try and do him favors for which he'd have to feel grateful.

Almost, not only because she had better control of her face than that even with no one watching but because if the whole sentence had really started with 'I don't,' then it sounded as though Dumbledore might just have managed to put Severus into a position where there was a question, at least, of whether he owed something.

Given some of the things Severus and Evan hadn't-quite-said so that she wouldn't-quite-know, it was entirely possible that this was something Severus had intended. Even if the Naj knew what he was doing (or hoped he did), however, this was Dumbledore and so it was dangerous.

"Now, really, Severus," Dumbledore said, with just a hint of gentle reproach. "I think we both know your position was becoming a little uncomfortable. Even your young Mr. Rosier was of the opinion you needed a teacher. And you wouldn't have been safe and well long without one, would you?"

From the way Severus's throat tightened for a moment and his eyes narrowed still further, Narcissa suspected a double meaning there. He didn't bite, though, which was impressive for him.

Instead he said, coolly, "This is the second time you've tried to pressure me by grotesquely misrepresenting the way debts work. It didn't work the first time. If you thought it did, then you, like those you did convince, were misled by the lure of wanting to believe. It won't work now, either."

 _Oh, Sledgehammer!_ Narcissa thought, caught between wanting to moan and shout at him and simply tear her hair in frustration. She'd thought he was over being so suicidally blunt!

Dumbledore either was being patient with him or didn't mind, though. He sounded genuinely curious as he asked, "How, then, do you believe that 'debts work'?"

Severus had his sorry attempt at Darkly and Sardonically Amused on, the so-called smile that always did look more like the cold, humorless snarl he was usually feeling when he pulled it on. "X-person has done D-deed which benefits Y-person," he said. "So far, nothing is required of Y but appreciation of the benefit, though an effort at understanding X's motivations and what resources were spent purely on Y's behalf, rather than to benefit X as well, would be well-advised. Most simply, if X did D as the result of a contract, whether with Y or another, then that contract must be upheld. Whatever Y was bound to, if anything, with X or another party, must be done, and that's the end of it, no further obligation remains.

"Whereas," he went on, "If Y, or another, asked X to do D, then it's reasonable for X to ask Y for something done as a return-favor. But _if it isn't asked for at the time, before_ X has agreed to do D, then while a yes would be graceful and some social pressure is imposed, even in some cases the pressure of consequence, any feeling of _guilt_ attached to a no is irrational. There's certainly no compelling obligation, particularly if it was in fact not Y who did the asking. And if it was not Y who asked, it is somewhat boorish of X to ask Y for the return-favor and not the asker. Y is justified in any resentment felt, whether or not Y agrees to return the favor."

His snarl was getting more overt, his eyes harder. "Some variations. If X has done D not only for his own benefit but _expressly to invoke feelings of gratitude_ in Y or place Y into a position of debt, especially but not exclusively it this was done for a particular purpose, or if D was forced on Y against his will—regardless of who considered it in Y's interest—then _absolutely no appreciation at all_ is called for, let alone gratitude or debt." He glittered his coldest, emptiest hatred in Dumbledore's direction.

Narcissa wished she could see the old wizard's face. His back hadn't moved; he was still standing quite comfortably, watching Severus with what on onlooker from this side, at least, could only understand as engaged but casual interest.

Severus was only cool again. He said, "As a sub-variant, if X wasn't asked to do D but asked Y's permission himself, Y may assume that X did indeed have his own reasons. If the permission was given, then in this case Y has no just cause for resentment even when manipulation is suspected. However, whatever his feelings about D, about the benefit, all he is required to appreciate when it comes to _X_ is that request for permission. And that is merely the baseline courtesy due one sentient creature by another in any non-emergency situation; whether or not it's often granted in practice, as it's meant to be, it calls for no _extraordinary_ appreciation. Again: no obligation accrues."

Narcissa would happily have given all of Lucius's white peacocks to know what all that was about. Of course, the sacrifice there was in how much fuss Lucius and his father would make about it and how much less Evvie would twitch when he visited. It wasn't primarily in losing the noisy, incontinent things themselves, even if they were pretty and soothing to watch. There would be quite a lot of fuss, though.

"You chop logic as finely as lacewings," Dumbledore observed, sounding so tickled that Narcissa was terribly afraid Severus would punch him. "It's a great pity we don't have a class in the law; you'd have done rather well at it."

"Logic isn't precisely what I was chopping," Severus said, gone dry and detached in a way she had seen once or twice before but still found frankly eerie and unlike him. "And it's a great pity for a great many more reasons than that."

"Perhaps, perhaps," Dumbledore allowed with meaningless and smiling politeness, and walked a few steps to dust off a stool and sit on it. Now she could see half his face, at least, but it didn't make her feel better. The familiar vague and benevolent twinkle had gone disturbingly keen. They'd all known that side of him had to be there, of course, whatever they said aloud, but seeing it was a different matter. "But I think we may have gotten tangled again, Severus. I said nothing of being owed anything; I merely said I had expected you to realize that something of this sort was coming."

They were really going to have to work harder to train Severus out of that caught-out eye flicker. Hopefully Dumbledore, despite all those disciplinary meetings, wouldn't know him well enough to understand that it meant, _Yes I did, but the Discombobulating Dustcloud of Tangential Indignation was worth a try…_ oh, rot, he was smiling. Indulgently. And now Severus was looking _depressed,_ which was as good as an outright confession, _curse_ the boy!

"Now, I have no doubt," Dumbledore went on benignly, "that if you spoke of our lessons to anyone, you represented me as having been motivated by—"

"Exactly what you very heavily implied you were?" Severus interrupted him dryly.

"You're welcome," Dumbledore inclined his hoary head, twinkling roguishly.

"Ha!" snorted Severus, but it wasn't one of his bitter scoffs. If he didn't agree with the old man, Narcissa thought, he wasn't far from it.

"I did rather trust you were under no such illusions, though, my boy," Dumbledore said, looking at Severus with a concern that so nearly looked real that Narcissa was worried Severus might actually allow himself to be provoked by the clear insult to his intelligence.

Severus just looked with veiled, guarded eyes into the blue ones for a long, careful moment, though, and finally said, "Some gambles are necessary."

"Oh, come now," Dumbledore said, sitting back in as much disappointment as though Severus had insulted his intelligence right back. "Only one motive, Severus, really? Am I meant to believe this?"

"Some motives are so powerful that inefficiency is forgivable," Severus replied, trying to be haughty and not in the least (to Narcissa's eyes, at any rate) succeeding. Actually he looked as though what he was really trying for was to get away with something, and rather desperately at that. "I would make a most unphotogenic Ophelia."

"This room is very safe now," Dumbledore said gently, "and our mutual friend assures me she believes you entirely capable of guarding such secrets as aren't specifically hunted down."

Severus looked deeply resentful, but he didn't seem to violently disagree. He stewed for a moment, then shoved a defiant, "We weren't speaking of _my_ motives," at the old wizard.

"Of course we were," Dumbledore contradicted him, amused. "But, very well. I had wanted to know what you imagined mine to be."

"No damned room's that safe," Severus growled. Narcissa's eyebrows flew up.

"I really must introduce you to Alastor," Dumbledore murmured, even more amused. "Very well. Perhaps, then, you might tell me why you went along with it instead of seeking out another teacher on your own? Surely you couldn't have been _expected_ to cleave to me _,_ after—"

"Oh my _god,_ shut up," Severus blurted, horrified and staring at him. "What did I _just say?!_ "

"Ah, yes," Dumbledore affected to recall, making the most token effort at hiding a smile Narcissa had ever seen. And she'd seen Sirius trying to convince himself Reggie wasn't adorable before Siri had felt it necessary to go make everything complicated and horrible. "You don't trust my security."

" _Correct!"_

"You know," Dumbledore tapped his lips with a finger, still twinkling, "there are some who might consider that offensive, Severus."

"I daresay there are," Severus retorted drolly, "but you're not that stupid."

"High praise indeed!" Dumbledore sat back chuckling.

"Regrettably rare, at any rate," Severus said, meticulous and dry, which was when Narcissa's whole world was twisted by the realization that the two of them rather _liked_ each other, it wasn't just Dumbledore being charming and obnoxious and scaring Severus into letting half his masks down.

"Madam Nell," her friend went on, "said my _seule fleur_ charm for beekeepers was completely new to her—which I'm not entirely sure I believe, mind you, but if she's not simply an astonishingly good social liar—which would admittedly be the Occam's Razor explanation—then it absolutely proves that there's always someone out there who knows _something_ you don't, whoever you are and even if you only don't know it because they've only yesterday pulled it out of their… ear, and there'll always be something new."

Narcissa frowned, because originally she'd assumed that he'd been hyperbolic for melodramatic effect to poke fun at Dumbledore, and now it looked like not. If not, then he was, in her opinion, being a little too helpful, suggesting someone might get around the professor's wards. Of course, he had a very difficult time with keeping his mouth shut when he knew something he thought everyone ought-to-but-didn't at the best of times. Still, even though he couldn't have known she was listening _now_ …

"I have every confidence in your creativity," Dumbledore assured him.

"Gah," uttered Severus, radiating profound disgust.

Dumbledore let Severus glare at him for nearly a full minute, which showed, Narcissa had to admit, remarkable stamina. After a while, though, he started blithely humming. Something by Purcell, she thought, although he was horribly (but, after seven years of Welcoming Feasts, unsurprisingly) off-key and she couldn't be sure.

Poor Severus's face started twitching after only a couple of bars, but his own stamina was nothing to sneeze at either.

When Dumbledore got to the end and started over and Severus looked agonized but thoroughly unlikely to cry uncle, Narcissa took mercy. She air-painted a disintegrating rune into one of the more obvious weak spots in the wards (one wouldn't wish to _embarrass_ the old man) dropped her chameleon charm, and knocked sedately.

"Hello, darling," she breezed in when her friend had opened it for her, kissing his pathetically grateful face. "You know, I think we ought to consider moving to North America; it may be barbaric over there, but I understand they've outlawed cruel and unusual punishment." She gave that just enough of a beat to see him understand she'd come in when she had to save him from the splintery whistling, and to see the desire to laugh fight three kinds of panic under his cool welcome. Airily long-suffering, she lamented, " _All-day amateur tournament Quidditch,_ really, whose idea was that?"

"Er… mostly your husband's," Severus reminded her apologetically. "The all day part, anyway. I just said how about an afternoon game to give the brewers a treat and raise some," he moved his hands aimlessly, "whatever he raises with his events, and then he went all," he gestured again, "enthusiastic. He said under normal rules it might be over in five minutes, and it just _went_ from there."

"With sticky candyfloss and the Hobgoblins on a sonorus," she agreed on a dismal sigh. " _So_ noisy, darling, and parasols and brim hats won't do for watching Quidditch even on a bright day."

"No, they do rather obscure the view of the field," Severus agreed, looking as if he'd been nearly lulled into hoping she wasn't toying with them, wasn't actually fool enough to believe it, and was enjoying her anyway. She really was terribly fond of him sometimes. "One's own and others'."

"You don't mind if I keep you company in the cool, do you, at least until Lucius's team goes back on? Wonderful!" she beamed.

"Not at all," Severus said.

"I'm afraid," Dumbledore spoke over him amiably, "that I must monopolize Severus's time a trifle longer."

Narcissa turned and gave him an arch once over. "And who is this handsome gentleman?" she asked Severus sternly. "Ought I to be informing my poor cousin of the company you're keeping when his back is turned?"

Dumbledore looked astounded. It was a pity Narcissa had no camera, but using one would have ruined the moment in any case. "Perhaps," he said to Severus, "Mrs. Malfoy would benefit—"

"Narcissa's eyes are fine," Severus cut him off dryly. "She's trying to encourage you in your sudden inexplicable plunge into not being a migraine-inducing eyesore."

Narcissa slapped his arm, years of Severus-herding instinct overwhelming the little _but it wasn't at all obvious what he was going to say_ voice nagging for her attention. "Severus! How rude."

"Aren't you, though?" he asked, unmoved.

She sniffed. "I wasn't going to put it like _that_."

"Good thing for you I was here to translate, then," he said cheerfully. "I always thank Evan when he does it for me." Ostentatiously, he checked his pocket-watch, every line of him clearly waiting for her effusive gratitude.

"You do not," she corrected. It was one thing to be gracious; it was quite another to do it on demand when people were, in any case, only being _difficult_.

He considered, and finally admitted slyly, "Maybe not out loud."

"I am sorry to take you away from what I can see is a very good friend," Dumbledore said patiently, "but—"

"The one who got right past your excellent security?" Severus asked sweetly.

"…Because you let her in, Severus," the old wizard pointed out patiently.

"Not really, sir," Narcissa informed him with sympathetic regret. "Although you shouldn't be too hard on him, Severus; it was quite good warding. Only I think it may have been butchered along with the Purcell."

"No, if you start making digs at each other I have to mediate," Severus said immediately, apparently alarmed more by this prospect than any of the several he ought to have been (she didn't believe it for a moment). "You'd better leave that to me, because if you want me to do the diplomacy we're all _doomed_."

"Oh, yes, I see," Narcissa agreed, patting his hand, although she still didn't, quite. What she did see was the play at everything's-fine-we're-all-on-good-terms-here he was making, and how hard he was throwing himself into it.

"Do you enjoy Purcell, Mrs. Malfoy?" Dumbledore asked her, apparently charmed. If he wasn't genuinely unfussed that she'd heard past his wards, he was either doing a good job of faking it or taking his lead from Severus as well.

"As a rule," she told him severely.

"She strongly disapproves of my fume-protectant, too," Severus informed him. "Unaesthetic side effects."

"That dreadful stuff is also a travesty," she agreed.

"…That's not rude?"

"You're my responsibility," she explained. This was mostly for Dumbledore's benefit; Severus did usually seem to put out of his mind the very obvious fact that he was accepted only because he had sponsors (and she was glad that he did; it weighed on him and made him fractious when he remembered, and in any case his blood was much better than it looked at first glance, as anyone might suspect after two minutes' attention to his spellwork), but he wasn't a fool.

"No, I meant about the professor's humming."

"As the professor so kindly provided me with my education," she said demurely, "so I regard it as my duty to give him information which may save him from future embarrassment."

"Mmmm-hm," Severus drolled.

Dumbledore was frowning now, and though he was doing it gently, she couldn't help regarding this as a bit of a coup. "Are you her responsibility, Severus?" he inquired.

"…Er," Severus stalled, looking suddenly very boy-like and trapped. Didn't want to admit it in front of another man, probably, poor pet.

"In what way?"

"…It's a Slytherin thing and it's very nice of her to feel that way and I'm not arguing with the rabid alligator?" Severus offered weakly.

"There's a lamb," Narcissa smiled comfortingly at him, and took his arm. "You see?" she asked Dumbledore. "The boy can't be let out without a keeper. The trouble he might get into simply boggles the mind." She let her eyes cool a little—not fully mirror-hard, just enough to show she meant business and who exactly was and wasn't the trouble in this room.

Dumbledore was silent for a moment, and then mused aloud, "Now, I wonder how I got the impression you were primarily Lucius Malfoy's friend, Severus."

"Lucius," Severus said, looking a little dry, "is very much in the Horace Slughorn school of Slytherin. When you believe yourself to be a Useful Connection to someone, it's considered doing them a favor to advertise that connection. I don't mean he isn't," he added to Narcissa, "but, you know."

She conceded, "He is rather enjoying being in a position to be of use to his friends," and they looked at each other in mutual understanding. What Lucius was, in fact, was puppyishly excited about being allowed publicly visible responsibility and the chance to start being a real face for the family. While it was mostly adorable, even she wished, just a bit, that he could learn to be a little less bombastic in his enthusiasm. It wasn't in the least surprising that a spotlight-shirker like Severus would find it all entirely cringe-making even when it didn't involve him.

"Reverse name-dropping," Dumbledore said, looking for confirmation.

"Could be considered a bit insulting," Severus agreed, not sounding insulted just at the moment, although Narcissa was positive he did, in fact, resent it when he was in one of his moods.

Dumbledore was regarding Narcissa's iron grip on Severus's arm contemplatively. He looked curiously into her face, and she smiled blandly at him. She could feel Severus twitch next to her, less like a nervous rabbit than a leashed crup who wasn't being permitted to bite the burglar he could clearly see making off with the silver and wasn't even sure he was supposed to because it smelled just a bit like family.

"Mrs. Malfoy," the old wizard asked courteously, "do you understand what you're attempting to walk into?"

"What do you _take_ me for?" Severus snapped, and now he was insulted, his hand closing protectively over Narcissa's wrist.

She laid her own hand over his fingers. Coolly, she replied, "Certainly I do."

"I just said you _don't!_ " Severus explained at her in an I-want-to-be-howling-at-you voice, even more massively offended, and also hurt.

She ignored him. It was the only way. "I'm walking in on you attempting to bully our Severus, again, and pressing him so hard this time that he can't be permitted anymore to make all the decisions about whether he's to be allowed to play shield for everyone."

Frowning up at Severus, she added, "You can be very selfish that way, you know, Severus—no," she amended contritely as he began to sputter. "I didn't mean that, exactly, darling. I know you've been relieved to have something you can do for us on your own, but it's very wrong of you to spend so much time letting a Gryff encourage you to think stupidly about risks the way that they do. Especially after you were raised by one, you know."

Severus stopped sputtering and hung there for a moment with his mouth slightly open. He shut it with a snap, then started, "No, but," and stopped. After a moment, he tried, "Look, I…"

She smiled quizzically up at him.

"It's actually much more complicated than that!" he insisted.

"I sincerely doubt it, darling," she commiserated, patting his arm. "You've fallen back into fifth-year habits, that's all. And it's very silly. You know perfectly well that cats who walk by themselves get skinned for their manes as curiosities. You owe Evan more care for yourself than that, Severus."

"Not fair," he muttered.

"No, it's not at all fair of you to risk yourself when you know perfectly well what it does to him, being on his own," she agreed. "Not fair to all the innocent bystanders, either, I might add."

"I hate everybody," he announced morosely, after a moment.

"Of course you do," she patted his arm again.

"Yes, but look," he said earnestly, "you don't want to be involved. Really you don't, honestly. I know what I'd say to intense people about odd memories and associations; do you?"

She made a slightly better than token effort at not looking at him like he was crazy right in front of Dumbledore—but only slightly better. "Of course I do, Severus."

'Intense people' meant Lucius and Bella, of course, although only Bella was really _intense_. No one but family had the right to ask Narcissa questions, as she'd been able to keep from actually taking on that ugly brand the two of them were so proud of. Most of her family, including the ones who wore it more in resignation than joy, thought Narcissa was the only one of her generation who was tacking a sensible course anyway, and she could handle Lucius and Bella.

Of course, Bella wouldn't _like_ hearing that Narcissa was helping Severus, but Narcissa could put it more tactfully than that. Severus wouldn't like how she'd have to put it to keep Bella happy, but he'd understand. Besides, even if he hadn't been so completely likely to thank her for it anyway, possibly even before he'd finished grumbling, he was a great deal safer to make unhappy than Bella was.

"I know what to tell them about you, too," she added comfortingly. "You'd think much more clearly if you stopped worrying so much, you know."

Severus said, "Rrrgh," coherently enough that she could hear every letter. Clearly she ought to have thought to explain life to him in front of outsiders before, if he was going to be this docile about it.

However, "Forehead, darling," she mentioned in concern. He was lagging miles behind acceptable bride-standard in the looks department already without courting ugly, sad, stress-wrinkles. Really, his mother was entirely useless; Narcissa shouldn't have had to still be doing this for him now he was grown.

 _"Extended fire-ant death with rusty scalpels and boiling treacle to all people everywhere,_ " he snarled.

"You're so _odd_ sometimes, Severus," she said affectionately, and patted his wrist supportively through his sag of despair, even though it wasn't at all the done thing to suggest with his body language that she was the one holding him up.

"I beg your pardon," interrupted a bemused Dumbledore. Narcissa kindly refrained from emphasizing that this was, in fact, exactly what he ought to be doing, and that if wizards his age weren't expected to have dodgy knees it would have been something of an outrage that he wasn't on them. "Mrs. Malfoy, what exactly do you think is going on here?"

"Why, you're utterly failing at delicately ascertaining why Severus has been allowing you to court him, of course," she blinked at him, injecting her tone with perplexed patience.

Dumbledore looked dumbfounded. It was a good look on him, even though he wasn't hiding it too badly.

Severus squawked, "What is _wrong_ with you, woman?!"

"That I'm talking to a Gryffindor, obviously," she retorted.

"I wouldn't be too sure of that," he said ambiguously, in one of his dark voices.

"And in any case," she sailed on, "I can't stay here quite _all_ afternoon, darling. If I'm not in the stands when Lucius's team comes back on, he'll miss me. So we might pick up the pace a bit."

"I may weep," uttered Severus grimly, after a moment.

"Don't be silly, darling, you wouldn't even weep in front of me, let alone people," she said airily, and turned her face up a bit to peck his to mask the monitoring array she was tracing into the arm of his robe. "I wasn't being frivolous, Severus, you know; if he misses me he'll ask where I was."

"Yes, no, I do realize," he said resignedly. "Only, I as of this moment officially resign my title of Official Slytherin Blunt Instrument. It's yours, I am eclipsed as by the morning star, wear it in good health and with my blessing."

Narcissa frowned. "I don't think the morning star usually does any eclipsing, does it?"

"No," he explained, "I was calling you the Devil. And also an enormous club with a spiky metal ball on the end, hitting people over the head and in the gut, for the purpose of."

"Isn't he sweet?" she asked Dumbledore, beaming, and bussed Severus's hollow jaw again.

"Do you have any hypotheses?" her old headmaster asked, done being bemused and now only looking keen to hear her opinion.

Mud. Now she was going to have to come up with an answer that would suit him _and_ the Dark Lord (in case anyone ever did find out about this conversation, which was clearly what Severus was afraid of), which Severus could not only agree to but carry off credibly.

More, an answer that suited the Dark Lord would probably also have to suit Bella; Narcissa would be most ill-advised to make anyone important look bad by _anyone's_ definition, let alone to say anything incriminating. So she couldn't even use his should-have-been-obvious-to-everyone discomfort with his slimy former roommates, who'd been so happy to bully him until he'd made himself too strong for it, and so many of the other enthusiasts around their age. That would have given Dumbledore the impression that one or both of them not only could but would give him names. It could have been worse, though; Severus obviously hadn't given Dumbledore any answers yet.

She raised her eyebrows at the handsome old wizard in amusement, and laughed, "You can't tell me it's any secret to anyone with eyes that Severus would rather cut his hair short than do anything sensible when there's a chance of his friends getting hurt—"

"You keep away from my hair."

"But you look so tidy and _sharp_ with it pulled back, darling. I'm sure if you'd just—"

"No!"

She shrugged, long since resigned, and turned back to Dumbledore before she drove Severus to tell her she sounded like his revolting father again. "You should have seen him scheming to get onto the pitch after he saw my cousin Evan play for real the first time," she went on fondly. "Just so the ridiculous boy wouldn't be up there alone, as if Reggie and the Beaters—"

"Reg had enough to do making goals and watching his own back," Severus said mulishly, for the thousandth time.

"Yes, darling, you've said," she agreed patiently. As if that wasn't what he ought to have been doing himself. "And everyone knows that," even now she couldn't quite stop her mouth pursing or her nose doing that thing it did, "little red-headed girl he used to be friends with is one of your charming little helper-elves."

"Does everyone?" Dumbledore asked with slight emphasis, not looking particularly happy about it. So he did have half a brain left unrotted by his vile muggle sweets.

"Yes," Severus said shortly. "Everyone does. Half our problem with each other at school was that neither she nor anyone she knew could grasp the concept of either working towards a goal or holding an opinion _quietly_."

Dumbledore paused, and from the expression on his face Narcissa got the impression he was about to try to be Slytherin, or at last reasonably canny. She winced to herself in anticipation. "Perhaps," he offered with the air of one trying with a pure heart to be helpful, "Mrs. Malfoy's notion of translation would have merit here. Sadly, students from different Houses do often seem to be speaking past each other, as it were. Perhaps I could be of assistance, Severus? What is it you would have liked her to understand?"

Narcissa revised her opinion slightly upwards as Severus pulled in a cautious, surprised breath, held it long enough that she knew he was not only thinking but working. "I think I would want her to understand," he said carefully, "that if you want anyone to listen to you—to listen and agree—it's no good shouting at them that they're wrong and bad. That kills credibility. People are influenced by those who at least seem to think like them, people they feel are in sympathy with them and who they feel they can understand. Right?" he asked Narcissa.

"Except that no one understands you, darling," she smiled, "and some of us are clever enough to listen anyway."

"Well, I say you're all mad, and I certainly listen to you because you'll hurt me if I don't, so there you are," he replied peaceably, quirking a sardonic side-smile at her and an exaggerated look of fear down at her apparently-dainty slippers with their really quite modest heels. She laughed.

He went on, back to Dumbledore, "I'd have told her, if it had been safe to do it at school, between the students and the ghosts and the portraits all gossiping like cows drooling over their cud—"

"Oh, really, _Severus,_ " she protested, making a face.

"—that there's only so much one can do to change people's minds, and therefore their choices, without being part of them. Of course," he added with that meticulous tone that often meant he was just being thorough but clearly didn't just now, because he was suddenly squeezing her fingers to catch her attention, "when people's minds are really set, there's only so much one can do in regards to their behavior from inside, without external allies. Always a balance question, isn't it?"

Narcissa frowned unhappily. Not on her face, of course; needing to be careful about wrinkles went double for her, as she not only had a complexion to protect but a husband who was _not_ artistic to keep in awe of her beauty. She knew he'd see it in her eyes, though, as she asked, "Do you really think so?"

"Don't you?" he asked, precisely as thrilled about the whole matter as she was.

"We were going to…" she stopped, conscious again that they were as far from safely alone as it was possible to be.

"How well has that been working?" he asked wearily. "Well enough in the mainstream, I'm not discounting what you and Ev do there, but the zeitgeist around the fringes isn't turning towards moderation or reasoned consideration. Quite the reverse. One or two coat-tail hangers, but… and I thought it was for oh, five minutes there, but no. Do you think that attack was undirected? That it's some apolitical coincidence two muggleborn Aurors and a near-squib with a muggle husband have all disappeared without a trace, or any sign of struggle? _I don't like this,_ " he said sharply, ignoring Dumbledore now and speaking directly to her. "I don't like the up-tick in violence in Knockturn and the muggle areas near Diagon, or the number of people who just happen not to have Old Family surnames who've been coming into St. Mungo's recently with accidents whose details they so-coincidentally seem to be blurry on. You've always trusted me to see trouble coming, haven't you?"

"Because you never miss it," she argued, lifting her chin at him although she was quailing a little inside. They both knew perfectly well that none of those things were nothing _like_ coincidences; it reassured her immeasurably that he wasn't spilling beans recklessly (frost giants were quite enough to be going on with). Still, giving up on something the three of them had had a silent understanding about for so long, inviting outsiders in, very likely at the ultimate expense of family, and for what? Human sheep? "Not because everything you see coming comes true. It doesn't, Severus, you know it doesn't."

"I'm not saying give up on influence," he assured her, because he was good at knowing what she was thinking.

He'd squeezed her hand again, this time for reassurance. She never had understood Evan being attracted to him in a bed sort of way, even when she'd seen him in his own real colors (insofar as black and white were colors) or Lucius had gone on about his bottom (admittedly well-shaped for a bookworm, but so bony, and part of their Naj in any case. It was so awkward when Lucius's fantasy-play went there, but what Severus didn't have to admit he knew wouldn't, at least in this arena, make him die of humiliation). There was nothing outside her own bed more comforting than his strong grip, though, since she'd gotten too old for Mama to cuddle. It had been there since she was twelve.

Which was, now she came to think of it, about the time Mama had stopped cuddling and started telling her she was a young lady now and had a duty to uphold her name. Which was all Andi's fault, Narcissa was positive. It was certainly when they'd lost her.

She sighed, and tilted her head at him a little, the weight of her hair sliding down her shoulder. "You're saying options," she concluded.

"Yes."

"You need to start working on your trousseau," she told him crossly.

"…Er?"

"Severus Snape," she scolded, still crossly and still with her face perfectly serene, "I know perfectly well you got that nose from one of Phineas Nigellus's sixty-odd by-blows whether you're admitting it or not—"

"I—what?"

"—And if you're going to _be_ a Black witch you need to stop pretending that you aren't, it's thoroughly _scandalous!_ "

 _"What?!"_ he gaped at her.

"Oh, do close your mouth, darling, you look like a batfish who forgot his lipstick. Give me a Troubled Brow potion and your room key, please."

"It's _Raveled Brow,_ " he said plaintively, with that slightly stunned look the boys sometimes got around her for some reason, fishing around in his pockets for them.

"You're not allowed to name things, darling," she told him patiently, holding out her hand.

He was ignoring that, the way he always did, and only wondering what she wanted his key for when he asked, "Why?"

"Because I want a lie-down before Lucius and Reggie's team come on again, of course," she said, sighing at his stupidity, "and if I apparate back to the manor the elves will fuss.

"Now, Severus," she went on briskly, "I don't want to have to talk to Professor Dumbledore or any of his pets beyond incidental meetings; it would be difficult to explain and, in any case, watching him try to be coy gives me a headache." She turned back to Dumbledore and assured him graciously, "No offense, sir, you're quite good for a Gryffindor, only it's such a low bar, you see."

Actually the problem was speaking to and in front of him in a way that he'd very-nearly understand without making him suspicious. As pleased as she was that Severus approved of her adoption of his style, it really wasn't hers. If that weren't enough, that butchery of perfectly good music had been truly appalling.

"So Severus informs me," Dumbledore told her in a slightly odd voice, hand over his mouth so that all she could see was his beard.

She smiled warmly at him, and turned back to Severus. "So you'll just have to let me know what you want yourself, darling. And _don't_ get in more trouble than you can help or I'll have to take a hand, and no one wants that."

"No one wants that," he agreed faintly, still inexplicably looking as though someone had hit him with his own green lightning spell. "Oh my god, _at all_."

"That's right," she approved, and kissed his cheek again, in farewell. "You behave, now," she instructed, meaning it half generally and half to warn him against taking off, before he and Dumbledore were done with each other, the ward-bypass she'd put on his sleeve earlier. Inclining her head civilly at the old wizard, she floated smoothly out. The room key was a portkey, of course, but it was terribly impolite to fail to use doors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **notes** : Yes, Severus said that. Yes, Severus. Yes, he understands that. Hello, implications. No, I'm not the first author with this opinion, go ahead, read the books again, I'll wait.
> 
> Yes, Narcissa thinks of Severus as a witch, not a wizard, and as her sister. No, that doesn't mean she thinks he's a _woman_ in any way, or even considers him a woman _as opposed to a man_ , or actually believes him to be her sister. No, she sees no contradiction in any of this. Yes, Severus is aware of it. He prefers not to dwell on the matter, but is afraid of her. I mean, resigned.


	58. Petroc Hall, Dartmoor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When a slythe Gryffindor and a mane-brained Slytherin are at loggerheads, any _true_ serpents in the vicinity are in serious danger of self-induced concussions. Or: Narcissa talks to the people in the teevee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  ****: circumlocution liek whoa. I can't _tell_ you how much the Sev-muse Did Not Want To Do This Chapter. Seriously, it took forever. He wasn't any happier about it in-story, either.
> 
>  **Q &A**: This week's question theme is Sneakery. If you wish to extend this to footwear, that is acceptable. These are just prompts, anyway. (g)
> 
> I will just remind people that these should be questions for the characters. A few of the questions about magic last time were cool but also pure world-building stuff, and the characters just sort of looked at them and went, "...We've already taken our OWLs, bye." 
> 
> Despite that, most of these along with the rest are at the Bonus Extras post: Ch 10: Finite Rotatum the world, I want to get off.  
> (No, it's not a very funny chapter title. It was more a geeking-out chapter than a funny one, tbh, so there you are.)

"Oh god," Severus said again, faintly, after a very long time. He repeated himself in a stronger voice, and then collapsed onto a short-backed lab-stool, shoulders shaking silently.

Watching in her unshrunken quartz skrying plate as she unlaced her slippers, Narcissa was concerned until he threw himself back in the stool so hard a muggle one would have tipped over, doing a nearly silent, borderline-hysterical version of howling with laughter, just into the horrified hands splayed across his face like bars. At this point, she smiled indulgently, sat on his bed (happily, either he had aired and made it that morning or the hall took care of these things, because she was sure Evvie wouldn't have bothered) and snapped her fingers for her elf.

Melly, of course; the extremely young one Grandfather had given them was clumsy and overenthusiastic. She didn't want to deal with spills, or babbling, or having to punish him while she was trying to attend. Unlike Dobby, Melly was entirely professional. She was back with Narcissa's grapes and dementors-on-thestrals before she'd fully made herself comfortable, and didn't so much as hold the tray out to her before she was settled, let alone try and shove anything at her face.

"I am," Severus said eventually, when he could breathe again, "so, _so_ sorry about that."

Narcissa wasn't offended. Since he knew perfectly well that she was watching, that had been political. Or, more likely, A Men Thing. Lucius had assured her that men were allowed to have them, too—although she was dubious, especially when it involved apologizing for her own entirely appropriate behavior which had been useful to the sorry man apologizing.

"Who can hold back the riptides of Hanakapiai," Dumbledore said philosophically.

Severus frowned at him, purse-lipped. "That sounds about equally Japanese and not like a real place; I assume it's Hawaiian?"

"A truly beautiful place, if you stay out of the water," Dumbledore agreed. "We must get you out of the country more, Severus."

"Yes, well," Severus closed down that avenue with his tone.

Narcissa felt this was silly of him, even if other places' ley lines did make his feet itch. Dumbledore clearly was in pursuit of quite serious business, and she didn't think that Severus was properly braced yet.

Dumbledore smiled slightly. "Do I take it, by your apology, that you feel responsible for Mrs. Malfoy in return?"

"Certainly not," Severus lied. He was so bad at that. He went on more believably, fervent, " _No one's_ responsible for the Albino Erumpent. Lucius may think he is, but he is wrong. That crazy person does whatever the hell she wants, including letting him think mistaken things, do not be fooled."

"But?" Dumbledore was still smiling.

Severus shrugged. "Narcissa and Evan and I have always been partners. It's just, you don't ask her what she's doing."

"Plausible deniability?" Dumbledore asked wisely. Narcissa wondered whether Severus could see that he was trying-to-be-secretly sad and uneasy.

Severus laughed, just a breath. "Who, for Narcissa? No. The difficulty is that her explanations tend to go, 'Oh, yes, darling, not to worry, I've had a word with so-and-so's girlfriend." Or, well, it's been 'spouse' more often, recently. Anyway, then you ask, 'About the issue,' and she looks at you as if you've unaccountably chosen to sprout another head and says, 'No, Severus, about cosmetics, don't be silly, and by the way I need you to make her a tub of that spot-removing cream you came up with for Reggie in fifth year, there's a dear, and why don't you make a few extras for me to save time next time, just send my elf for your ingredients so you don't waste time on it,' meaning of course that she's paying for all the cream, Do Not Argue, and you can see she wasn't being sarcastic, so you say, 'Er, well, yes, fine, but what about the thing we're actually trying to take care of here,' and then she _laughs_ at you and says, 'Oh _Severus,_ didn't I _say_ I'd had a word,' and then you say, 'Yes, but you said it was about cosmetics,' generally in a despairing and confused voice with multiple exclamation points attached, and she pats your cheek and tells you you're just precious. Not asking saves time and reduces confusion all 'round."

Narcissa still didn't see what there was to be confused about. But she was moderately impressed with the way he'd made his voice feminine and not-baritone without going falsetto, or parodying her to the point where she was going to have to rip his throat out on principle.

"I see," Dumbledore said, sounding equally mystified. "Mrs. Malfoy sounds… most… efficient?" He didn't sound sad and worried anymore, exactly, more like someone experimentally prodding a sore tooth with a tongue to find out whether the pain was from tender sinuses to be remedied by pepperup or a serious problem in need of a mediwizard.

"God, Salazar, and Narcissa work in mysterious ways," Severus said dryly. "But efficient? I'm not sure I'd say that. Wind-washing away a sand dune isn't efficient, just because you yourself aren't applying the force. Dune damned well goes away, though."

"It would be foolish, I take it, to ask whether you trust her?" Dumbledore asked more cheerfully, with a contemplative twinkle.

"I refuse to answer a stupid, open-ended, unlimited question like that," Severus scowled at him scathingly.

"Do your best," Dumbledore encouraged him, smiling as fondly as if he'd made Severus up himself. "With the understanding that it's shorthand; I believe you know what I mean."

Mollified, Severus shrugged again. "She has her patterns, her loyalties, her preferences, and her agendas, and I believe I understand most of them. I wouldn't try to describe her operations in any detail. Ha, no. I've watched her do things she'd declared an intention to do and not had the least idea she was doing anything at all. But in broad terms, yes, she can be predicted."

"And what do you predict?"

The infuriating old man was still smiling, but Severus didn't look infuriated. He just gave one of his eyebrow-only shrugs and said, "She's a Black woman."

"Ah, yes, 'a Black witch,'" Dumbledore recalled. "And what is it, exactly, that the two of you mean by that?"

Severus stared at him. "Aren't you about a hundred?" he asked dubiously.

"And not, alas! closely embraced into the bosom of that particular family," a placid Dumbledore agreed (Narcissa would have snorted agreement if she would ever have been caught dead doing such a thing, even in front of her own elf), conjuring himself a somewhat elaborate glass carafe and filling it with water from his wand. The sides started to sweat.

"An excellent idea," Narcissa commented. Part of her headache was probably from sitting out in the sun too long, after all. "Only, limeade, I think. With ice, cucumber, and doxymint, Melly, and mind the sweetness."

"Yes, Mistress," Melly squeaked sedately, and disappeared.

"…Consider politics to be wizards' play," Severus was saying when Narcissa had her drink, which was fine. She wouldn't have used the phrase in front of Dumbledore if she hadn't wanted him to explain. Dumbledore wouldn't trust her even enough to be going on with if he thought that she thought like some silly _man_.

From everything she'd seen in and heard of him, he didn't listen to other people closely enough to understand how even other men really thought, let alone witches. Somehow his colleagues seemed to like and respect him anyway, despite those ridiculous airs of daftness he put on.

She thought, though, that this was mostly because he was too old to threaten the wizards sexually and he exasperated the women _just_ enough to leave them feeling just a tiny bit motherly, and was courteous while he did it in a way that no one knew what to do with anymore (if they ever had). People who didn't know what was going on or had gotten mixed up generally got angry or laughed: Dumbledore made sure that when he was the one confusing them, they were more inclined to smile.

There was a glass in front of Severus, but it didn't look as though he'd touched it. Good boy. "Or, no, that's not quite right," he corrected himself, frowning. "They consider _feudalism_ and political parties to be wizards' _toys_. So one might look like she's playing—and they often do dabble, for fun or to have an interest in common with the family to talk about at table. But when one that runs true to type gets serious, what she is in fact doing is wrapping up the game because her husband or son is up past his bedtime. Or getting humiliated," he added.

She shook her head reproachfully at his image in her skryer, having detected just a tinge of sadistic satisfaction at that thought. Possibly only because Dumbledore would like seeing him want Lucius taken down a peg, or but she'd still have to make him pay.

"And you consider that enough to make her predictable?" Dumbledore asked dubiously.

"Of course," Severus said, giving him an eyebrow. "Family's everything. Taking care of the family is the _only_ thing. One's methodology is personal, stylistic; once you have the core motives you have everything."

"There we can agree," Dumbledore said, "though I think personal style very important indeed."

"Well, obviously," Severus blinked. "But you need the destination a bit more than the road, I would have said; with only the road you can only try to catch up and follow the tracks, but with the destination you can lay in wait before and around it, and map out every route of approach. You don't absolutely need a particular person's style if you know the set of methods that are available to people generally and could be effective towards achieving the goal."

"You're getting sidetracked, darling," Narcissa commented, examining a grape critically, "And being far too helpful." Sad that he wouldn't hear her, but of course it would only have made him jump. And if anyone in his little lab over there could hear her, she would have had to take much more care to be quiet generally, and not allow Melly to apparate.

The grape appeared satisfactory, and proved to be so.

"…Ah, yes," Dumbledore said, after a moment of looking at Severus as though he were a particularly bizarre and delightfully intriguing piece of technomancy tied up with a very shiny ribbon (the impertinent old wretch!). "I recall Professors Marchbanks and Tofty remarking on the interest in strategic theory you showed during your OWLs and NEWTs."

 _The other day, when I contacted them to see what they remembered about you,_ Narcissa mentally filled in.

Severus shrugged grouchily. "I don't know why it's not a mandatory part of the Defense syllabi," he indulged his crabby and persistent dissatisfaction with the standards at an institution from which he had long since escaped. "For all the years. There's certainly enough material."

Narcissa sighed and shook her head at the waste of energy. Hogwarts was Hogwarts. But Severus was Severus. In both cases, there was nothing to be done about it.

"Now, who was it," Dumbledore pondered airily, "who said that admitting one's ignorance is the beginning of wisdom?"

"Socrates, as you know perfectly well, you unsubtle old smirk in a clotted-cream chin-thicket," Severus scolded him, laughing very nearly out loud. "Don't think for a moment you're escaping from that undetected!"

Dumbledore twinkled merrily as Narcissa raised an eyebrow at them. "Ah," he put on a mock-sad expression, raising a finger, "but you haven't answered my question, either, Severus. About Mrs. Malfoy," he reminded Severus when he seemed, as Narcissa was, confused about what he was supposed not to have answered, "and where you feel you may trust her."

"To be on my side," Severus said, still looking (as, again, Narcissa was) unsure about why Dumbledore thought he hadn't just been told this, "after her own family's. To do all she can afford to be sure that being on their side doesn't mean sacrificing me. To be on their, and my, side," he added, less in a _why am I repeating myself?_ tone, "in her own opinion, whether they, or I, appreciate her methods or her goals for us or not.

"Which has often been useful for me in the short term and can, I believe," he stressed with considerably more emphasis in his tone than he would have bothered with if speaking to nearly any Slytherins, "be useful for her family in a more global way. As it can be difficult to be reasonable and detached about one's own concerns in a moment, or, generally, about… the intersection of one's passions, opinions, and methods, let's say," he finished carefully.

Narcissa was impressed, and made a note to tell Evan he'd been right about Severus getting better with tact. Marginally better, at last. Dumbledore had to understand which political tangle Severus actually meant by that, given all contextual factors, and looked as if he did. Still, her friend's tone and daintily, wryly, humorously disapproving expression had given every appearance of suggesting that Narcissa had nothing to wrangle with of more import than some distant relative's sensual or drunken indiscretion, into the details of which no gentleman would inquire. Really, despite his thestral face, he looked like nothing so much as a kneazle who'd poked his nose into the saffron and was on the verge of sneezing.

Dumbledore was silent for a moment. Finally he suggested, gently enough that Narcissa just _knew_ he was going to put Severus's back up, "I wonder whether 'to be a friend' would have equally served your meaning?"

As predicted, Severus bristled. "That," he sneered, "is the second-fuzziest and most meaningless word in the English language. I say second, because 'fine' and 'nice' are tied for first and are practically synonymous—or would be, if they _meant anything at all_."

Narcissa said aloud, "Three… two… one…"

Right on time, Severus finished scowling thoughtfully and added, looking amused, "Actually, they can be synonymous in their meaningful forms, as well. Or very nearly. It's," his mouth quirked, "a nice distinction."

Narcissa sighed. She'd thought he was just going to find something to correct himself on, not a way to embarrass himself with wordplay in front of a wizard who was practically an institution all by himself, and by some people's reckoning, also effectively the entire government.

At least he had done one of his tangents after all, so she was allowed to buy Draco a new stuffed anything-but-a-dragon. Sadly, with the bet with herself half-lost she would also have to, in conscience, suggest Bella bring her husband along the next time she asked her to tea. Even with the elves taking care of everything and knowing that Rodolphus was in fact perfectly gentlemanly, she never could shake off the feeling that he left enormous tracts of mud all over her carpets every time he came by.

Fortunately for her opinion of him, Dumbledore was looking tolerant. Unfortunately for Dumbledore, Severus took patience and tolerance from anyone he didn't trust as an indication that if he pushed one step further he was going to get hit in the mouth. He apparently wasn't inclined to get in his hexing first when it was Dumbledore (thank Morgana), but he stiffened up and closed down at once.

Dumbledore looked surprised, but then as if he thought that however strange the reaction was, he could use it. Narcissa's eyes narrowed. She prepared to hate, obliviate, and, if necessary, hit him over the head very hard with a cast-iron cauldron if he wasn't careful.

Elf-wielded, of course. Even if she could heft a large enough one up that high, or swing it with enough force to make it through the head of someone who'd served decades as Head of Gryffindor, he would probably sense a human coming and be on his guard.

What Dumbledore said, kindly, was, "True, my boy, but I can't let _you_ get away with that unsuspected, either."

"…I knew that was coming back to bite me," Severus muttered, trying to look ruefully amused instead of hackles-up hand-on-his-wand frightened.

To her eyes, he wasn't doing a very good job, so she assumed he was trying to make Dumbledore feel powerful. He'd put on similar faux-faux-unintimidated acts before, with prefects who were trying to bully him. She'd told him and told him that it was better to _smile_ and nod and then do what you'd meant to anyway, but his _my smiles do not have that effect_ stance was, she had to admit, well-grounded in reality.

"Now, I'm going to do you the compliment," Dumbledore went on, "of assuming you did both know and recall, when you approached me, exactly who you were speaking to."

He was still speaking kindly even though he could see it working Severus up more. Narcissa, however, did _him_ the compliment, based the way he wasn't twinkling and didn't look like he was having fun, of deciding he was simply completely incompetent at being soothing.

"I beg your pardon," Severus said, hunch-shouldered and annoyed, "I did not approach you. I approached Professor Slughorn. You practically dived at me like a vulture and stuffed me in your pocket like a fallen knut from under his nose."

"No, you don't," Dumbledore wagged a long, thin finger at him, not quite playfully. "We'll argue neither volition nor denomination just at the moment—although it does pain me to hear a capable young wizard like yourself value himself so low…"

Severus shot him a flat-eyed look, still with his shoulders up. Narcissa made a note to tell Evan later, as discouraging Severus from this sort of self-depreciating nonsense was his job, not Dumbledore's. That was probably what Severus was irritated about now, she thought, if it wasn't simply about being condescended to.

"…But whether you approached me or let yourself be approached—you won't argue, I trust, complete choicelessness in the matter?"

Severus gave the impression of rolling his eyes with a mere flicker of a glance. He had gone so far now as to fold his arms over his chest and let his face still to a blank, reserved chill. It was the first time Narcissa could remember seeing him do that without looking like a sulky teenager. The difference was that he was only cautious and watchful now, not defiant or challenging.

It was only because she knew him, though, that she could tell he was being wary and not aggressive. He _looked_ the way Evan had always used to start looking a week or so into summer: distant, unimpressed, slightly bored, coldly evaluative without any particular interest. The expression had made Evan look like a rather tan vampire—probably because, when he got into that state, he really didn't care. When he acted as though he did, fussing fretfully about his tailoring, for example, or even his art, it was very clearly, to anyone who knew him, a matter of wanting something to do with himself other than watching grass grow.

The exact same expression made Severus look like… not to put too fine a point on it, like the sort of person who would intimidate all the younger children into paying him to rip the first drafts of all their essays apart, very snidely and without a shred of conscience. _Without_ offering the help with the second draft that had in fact followed (except when they had exasperated him beyond all bearing).

"We'll take volition as a given for the sake of the discussion," he allowed with a wintery little piece of a smile. "As a hypothetical."

"…Are you all right, Severus?" Dumbledore frowned.

"You're railroading me," the Naja informed him, with the brutal disregard for civility and device that Narcissa, Evan, and Lucy Wilkes had very-nearly-seriously considered getting him a patent on for his fifteenth birthday. "I don't appreciate it."

"Understandable," Dumbledore sympathized, "but you did rather invite it, you know, my boy."

"I don't concede that even as a hypothetical," Severus scowled at him—without moving his face: it was entirely contained in a further chilling of his eyes. Narcissa wished a pensieve would capture the image in her scrying plate properly; she could clearly imagine both her (remaining) cousins' reactions to their Severus looking very nearly dangerous, but seeing them in person would be _so_ much better!

"No?"

" _No._ "

Dumbledore waited, but Severus was in full hood-flaring cobra mode now, and evidently had no more to say. Saving his tongue to spit with, Lucy would have said (with regret).

"But you must have known, at least, it would be unavoidable," Dumbledore said, gentle again.

Severus still said nothing. It was a more sardonic silence, now, though, with overtones of refusing to agree out loud rather than snarling disagreement.

"Well, then," Dumbledore said comfortably, resettling himself a little. He didn't seem at all taken aback by the way Severus looked so very much like he wanted to spit in his eye and bite him. Narcissa, who had never gotten that look from Severus even before they'd been friends except during the Lockhart Incident, and never intended to earn it again, thank you, was taken aback by this nonchalance.

Then she realized, and said, "Oh!" aloud. _Pre-detention disciplinary meetings,_ of course. Dumbledore would be completely immune to that side of Severus by now, no doubt. It, was, she supposed, to his credit that his reaction to it was to _try_ to be soothing, even if he was only managing patronizing.

"Mistress?" Melly asked, stepping forward, evidently thinking she'd been called.

To save face, Narcissa said, "Melly, when I return to the stands, you're to go to the stationer and make an appointment for me for tomorrow at nine. Tell her to have a selection of invitation cards prepared, and that this will be for Harvest Home but I don't want anything overly," her nose wrinkled, " _holidaisical_. Nothing more seasonal than a wheat border; she ought to know what I prefer by now."

"Yes, Mistress."

She nodded, satisfied. She'd already been planning to stop by tomorrow, anyway, but Nibs would appreciate not having to drop everything for her without notice. She'd just have to make sure that she didn't make an appointment for Samhain (an 'I look forward to what you'll come up for me in October, darling!' would do), so that Nibs went on seeing it as a pleasant variation rather than something she might expected all time time.

Well, perhaps it would be prudent to make one for Samhain. Amanuensis would be nearly as swamped as Scrivenshafts and Scribbulus for Hallowe'en, just as for Yule. But, in that case, not for either Winterfinding or Lucius's birthday. No, certainly not for Lucius's birthday; if she made an advance appointment it would be much more difficult to surprise him.

"I'm _brewing,_ " Severus said savagely in her scrying plate, and she realized she'd missed something. Possibly several things. Neither of them were rushed speakers, but they seemed to make up for it with obscurely meaningful eye contact. Half the conversation was happening in there, she thought. It often was, with Severus, when he wasn't in love with the feel of words rolling in his mouth. This was a most vexing habit of his, though admittedly it was fun to be in on it. "You're an alchemist, you know about volatile processes with experimental cauldrons!"

Dumbledore got up, put a hand on his shoulder, and asked sympathetically, "Severus, every great leap into the unknown is daunting, but I simply can not believe that you didn't expect to make one. To be asked to, and to invite being asked to. Why risk it in the first place, then?"

"…It needn't be _you,_ " Severus failed to convince himself angrily, his shoulders halfway to his ears and his hair more than half over his face. "The Blacks aren't pleased about… the direction of the zeitgeist either, as a family. If Narcissa puts her mind to it, we can get other allies."

"Well, perhaps so," Dumbledore said lightly without removing his hand. "And perhaps you—or, rather, she, will in either case. But ought a Slytherin to refuse such connections as mine with the Ministry, the Aurors, the Wizengamot, and the International Confederation of Wizards? Not to mention the vast numbers of witches and wizards who had me as a teacher, rather than a Headmaster, and regard me, I would like to think—and you may ask your mother, if you doubt me—very much as you do my friend Filius?"

"Not really, darling," Narcissa told the plate sympathetically. She didn't mind getting caught talking to someone who couldn't hear her, at least not in front of only her own elf. It was only talking to oneself that was embarrassing.

"Severus," Dumbledore said again, as if gentling a wild animal. Which, of course, he was. "What happens if you balk, or if you fail?" For a moment, Narcissa thought Severus was going to give in right there, but their cobra was, even so agitated, cannier than that.

He roiled for a moment, and then resentfully burst out (so to speak; if the chance to get upset enough for exactly this rant hadn't been something he'd been angling for, Narcissa would invite her father-in-law over for supper every day in August), "And what happens if I put myself into the hands of someone with _such connections as yours_ on the Wizengamot? We had _nothing_ when I was growing up, _nothing_ but the house, and what we could bring in my father drank away. Do you think I can swear under Veritaserum I've never done anything illegal? I'd raided more gardens before I was _nine_ than you have," he flapped his hands in a wild attempt at diplomacy, "sparkly robes! And what happens then?

"Have you killed anyone?" Dumbledore asked, not as if he thought the answer was in question.

_"No!"_

"Hurt anyone when it wasn't self-defense? I won't count your little war of attrition with your schoolfellows," he assured Severus kindly, "unless you've inflicted some permanent damage I'm unaware of."

Severus paused, because nothing calmed him down like a question whose answer was in an interestingly grey area. Narcissa seldom took advantage of this because he could be so tedious about it (Evan clearly found it adorable, but he'd had moments of being completely odd over Severus even before they'd started speaking to him and calling him their friend), and also because he rarely let himself lose control around her in the first place.

"I've shot a few hexes at Lockhart and so on," he admitted judiciously. "But he was never hurt enough to fluster Madam Pomfrey or get her seriously hacked off with me. Anyway, it was only ever when he was a clear and present danger to my sanity, so that should count."

"Quite so, quite so," Dumbledore said gravely, lips twitching under his beard. "Is that all?"

"Oh, you know… used onion slices as antiseptic when muggle kids who'd been beating me up were stupid enough to demand I fix them afterwards as a forced ha-ha all in good fun wasn't it we're all friends now peace-offering, that sort of thing." He looked embarrassed, in a proud of himself sort of way. "It's not as if they don't _work…_ "

There was a moment where Dumbledore looked caught between amused at the younger Severus's response to being taken advantage of and appalled. Whether the latter was over Severus's vengeance-taking or why he'd needed to take it, Narcissa wasn't sure yet. He did not, she was sorry to see, seem to be taking it as the warning her friend had, she was sure, intended. "And how old were you?" he asked finally.

"Oh, they'd nearly stopped by the time I got my wand," Severus assured him with a nasty, satisfied look.

"So young to be so cruel," Dumbledore observed sadly.

Narcissa was sure (because even the Headmaster couldn't be that ham-handed) he'd meant the muggle filth who'd merited the onion. Severus, however, took it personally (of course), and bristled. "If you don't prove it's not worth it," he snarled, "they just _keep coming_."

"Yes, Severus," Dumbledore agreed, still sadly. "That's what I meant."

"…Oh." His hackles settled, although not by very much.

"I think we may chalk that sort of thing up to… call it proactive self-defense," Dumbledore decided. "But no—?"

"You have been in my _head,_ " Severus reminded him, more irritable than resentful. Narcissa choked, hard enough that she might have been in difficulties if anything had been in her mouth.

But, no, this must have been expected, whether or not intended. This would be why the Dark Lord thought it worthwhile to give Reggie a nervous breakdown over upsetting Bella so that Severus would have an occlumency partner. Whatever Severus's motives were (and now that the two of them had ensured she was seen by Dumbledore as Severus's appendage, as the Dark Lord saw her as Lucius's, she couldn't have cared less which side he was planning to support, if either. If he ever told her she would slap him silly before making him obliviate her, to make sure he'd never dream of doing it again), his measures were known and approved. That was all that mattered, at least for the moment.

"Ah, but not for interrogation," Dumbledore was saying cheerfully. "And in any case, my boy, you've been picking up occlumency remarkably well." With Severus silenced by discomfort with the compliment, he went on, "Never used magic on muggles for sport?"

Severus eyed him in what Narcissa just _knew_ was going to turn out to be grammar-related irritation, and said, predictably, "Yes." He gave it just a beat, because the ridiculous boy was addicted to Making His Point even when he hadn't explained it first, before finishing, "Yes, never. Terrible business model."

And then he had to explain about his dreadful mother's insistence on keeping centuries-old stereotypes alive by playing village witch to grimy, worthless muggle peasants. When she could have taken her child away from his nightmare of a so-called father at any point in the last ten years or so and joined or opened a reasonably respectable Wizarding shop of some sort or another.

The woman who'd taught Severus to brew could certainly have managed the potions for a tisanery; Severus had mentioned his childhood dream of her going to open a tea-and-potions café on the Sherwood's wizarding commercial street. Or she surely could have worked at an apothecary, perhaps even taken some extra study and gone to St. Mungo's. For Severus's sake, Narcissa would have been willing (if not happy) to loan her enough to get started with at quite reasonable interest rates—or to have had her parents do it, before she was able herself. But apparently the appalling woman was so selfishly set on whatever Gryffish insanity had hold of her that she wouldn't even let Severus get her a new wand.

"I see," Dumbledore said, a bit dubiously. In a just-checking sort of tone, he echoed, "So, then, you've restrained yourself for your mother's sake?"

Severus's lips curled in disgust, and he shot Dumbledore a deeply disappointed _you're SUPPOSED to be better than that_ sort of angry look. "No," he said, as though speaking to an Avery who was being unusually dense even for him, although not quite as crossly as if he were talking to one of Narcissa's old roommates who'd been giggling at him, "I haven't _restrained_ myself." He paused. "Much. Not from 'sport.' When they go after me, yes, I have to restrain myself. But I don't think swatting flies with cannonballs or pulling their wings off are amusing party games, if that's what you're getting at."

"More or less," Dumbledore agreed, cheerful again. "I hadn't thought you did, you know, although anyone would have wondered, Severus, from the way you put it!"

"Only anyone who'd been listening to my awful cousin," Narcissa told the plate, frowning.

"I know," Dumbledore was still saying, "from, oh, various sources, how helpful you were with the younger students in your House."

"Twits," Severus muttered without heat. Which was, of course, from, him, practically an outpouring of devotion, as most of them had very well understood. He called Evan worse on a daily basis, and it usually made Evan beam alarmingly.

Evidently Dumbledore, though, hadn't yet learned how either interpret or ignore Severus's face-saving _no, really, look, I'm heartless and curmudgeonly_ grumpy fits, because he chided, "Many of them seem to be quite fond of you."

"They're just too young not to have someone keeping an eye on them and regular bedtimes," Severus said dismissively, his back up again. "I get the feeling you want everyone learning independent functioning, and that's sense, but the way it's done is too much, too fast for most of them. Most of the purebloods, for example, always know at home that there's an elf keeping half an occult eye on them, if they don't have a human nanny who never leaves them alone in the first place. They like the freedom, of course, but I think it unsettles them."

Dumbledore looked at his face, set on uncaring, Ravenclawish pragmatism, with another of those fond expressions Narcissa didn't quite believe in. He murmured, "I always thought Eileen was a sensible girl."

Narcissa glared at him through her scrying plate. Not even just because the sentiment was disgusting, directed at someone who'd not only done something as foul as Eileen Prince had but who had in doing it utterly ruined the chances any of her children might have had for a normal wizarding life, let alone the esteem due her line. Severus was glowing _far_ more a blatant piece of manipulation like that deserved.

"In any case," the old wizard went on in a more businesslike manner, "so long as you haven't been murdering or torturing anyone—"

"Where do you _get_ these things from?" Severus asked, as appalled with Dumbledore as if he didn't know perfectly well what Bella's crowd was getting up to more and more often. Or suspect it, at least; she thought he was trying not to _know_ , so Reggie wouldn't see anything dreadful in his face when they looked at each other.

"—I don't think you need be overly concerned."

"That's awfully vague," Severus noted, eyes narrowing. "And, I notice, in no way a promise, let alone an oath."

"Why, Severus, what do you think you'd need an oath of that nature from me for?" Dumbledore asked, eyes widening as if he really thought he was going to get away with his absurd mockery of ignorant stupidity. "If you haven't been doing anything—"

"I don't mind playing games," Severus cut him off sharply (lying, Narcissa thought, only to himself), "but there's playing games and _playing games._ You want me for connections you think that I have or can make. Well, whether I have them now or not, although having them wouldn't be illegal as we speak, with your influence backing your opinions, it's a fair bet they will be illegal before long. Whether I tell you now I have any or make some later at your behest and inform you, that gives you power over me that you should, sir, at your level, be frankly embarrassed to catch yourself thinking you need, and which I certainly don't intend to give you without _reliable_ assurances of protection for me and mine."

He tilted his head sardonically at Dumbledore, not giving him a chance to speak. "You really think I couldn't have learned from books, or found a teacher in my own way? With Black resources mine for the asking? You've said already that you think I sought you out or knowingly allowed you to court me. Maybe so, maybe no, but in either case, the only reason there might be for making an alliance with you—when one could, even assuming the necessity for the sake of discussion, find other allies, and knows firsthand how ready you are to use and bulldoze and manipulate the people in your power, even children? That would be: to secure the protection of _your_ connections for one's own people.

"And, as I said," he went on, smiling coldly, "when one knows that a benefit received was given in an attempt at manipulation and gratitude-farming, no gratitude is owed. No debt is owed. Try to use what we've done so far as more than an ice-breaker, a way to get the conversation started, and you _lose_."

They looked at each other for a moment. Dumbledore said, sounding a little perplexed, "You're quite cynical, Severus."

Looking a little as though he were relenting but not actually doing it, Severus offered, "I didn't say I was sure you know you do it when you're doing it. Only, you absolutely do it, and I can't afford to let you."

Dumbledore finally asked, "And what protection are you bargaining for, for whom?"

"Oh, I'll give you white," Severus told him, with a rather twisted smile. "As you're named for it. You can go first. What can you offer?"

"Why, I hardly know," Dumbledore said, cheerful again. "I don't believe anyone's ever asked me before."

"And I'm meant to take that as a reproach," Severus translated, his smile not becoming any more pleasant. "You mean, _All my current soldiers are happy to offer themselves as sacrifices for The Cause and wouldn't THINK of asking anything in return._ If you expect me to take being called unGryffish as an insult, Professor, we're just not going to get anywhere. I'm not one: you do realize? Never wanted to be. Any decent Slytherin who hears that will think, what, are they so pathetic that it won't hurt anyone if they die, or are they so selfish they refuse to care, or so _bloody stupid_ they just haven't thought about it, or about what they can do for the people they care about themselves?"

"But they, on the other hand, might say that you can't see the forest for the trees," Dumbledore pointed out.

"Meaning my particular tree, and call it cowardice and selfishness. Asinine, childishly simplistic, and thoroughly blinkered. I can, in fact, see the forest," Severus said, raising a sardonic eyebrow. "I can see the forest, the root rot, the fungal infection, the forest fire, the locusts, the acid rain, and the withering from the hole in the ozone layer. You're the latter, by the way."

Narcissa, recovering quickly from the idea of acid rain (Severan hyperbole, surely) raised her juice glass with an appreciative smirk. Er, demure smile.

"I am prepared," he went on. "to not only brew remedies, haul water by broom, and do whatever else is appropriate to the metaphor, but to chivy my own to help me. But I believe that wanting dragonhide gear and gas masks against smoke inhalation for all of us is not merely reasonable but only sense. If you won't give them to us when you have them ready and to spare, then what use are you, what sort of person are you, and why should we coordinate with you?"

" _Acid rain_?" Dumbledore asked, horrified. About a minute and half late, by Narcissa's reckoning, but old people were usually good about not interrupting people they weren't related to. Or, at least, currently in charge of. Unless you were Severus and they'd claimed to know something about potions and then made a mistake. Then the shouting-over-each-other simply didn't end until Evvie wandered in pretending to be drunk.

"Read a newspaper," Severus snapped. "By which I do not mean a yellow-journalism gossip rag like the Prophet. Or try a craft journal. Sculptors have been fussing about it since the 17th century for what it does to marble, Evan says, and recently it's gotten much worse. It kills whole lakes, let alone trees. Also Manchester. Thank muggle mines, factories and power plants."

Dumbledore frowned. "Are you in sympathy with those who hate the muggles, Severus?"

"I could understand why they do if they bothered with reasons," Severus shrugged, making Narcissa frown, too. "We're outnumbered, and muggles innovate faster than we do. They forge eagerly ahead without paying much attention to the side effects. But that doesn't matter. Reasons are always just excuses one comes up with for explaining what's wrong with the people one already hates. If anyone knows that, I do. Did you know I sleep hanging upside down from the ceiling and polish Luke Malfoy's shoes with my own hair grease and make small Hufflepuffs cry for fun? Well, I say his shoes. To be polite. It was quite a surprise to me, second year. I hadn't known I did any of that. People seemed quite sure, though. Live and learn," he drawled. "Amazing what people can turn into, once you've decided you hate them and want to be free to treat them badly without people disliking you for it."

Before Dumbledore could say anything, he stormed on, smiling sweetly. Narcissa cringed, knowing this mood very well. He'd worked himself up into the sort of temper where he simply didn't care what happened to him. This was the mood in which he had, when they'd been twelve, before they'd been friends, been known to attack prefects who in his opinion were not doing their jobs.

He had, to do him credit, only ever meant to do it verbally, but he was incapable of holding back in this state. Once in their first year, when Scrimgeour had impatiently cast a silencio on him and started walking away (two cobras in the House at once historically being an erumpent fight waiting to happen), Severus had gotten so angry he'd flown at the Head Boy and bitten him on the bottom (which was as far as he came up to). He'd left quite bad burns where his teeth had been, too, and where he'd dug nails into the older boy's legs. Lucius _still_ looked at Severus, sometimes, when he'd recently been by the Auror division, and then couldn't stop laughing for five to ten minutes, no matter what Severus threw at his head.

"In case you were confused," Severus purred on, "yes, I bloody well am saying you're all the same. The only difference, as far as I can see, is what each faction thinks the status quo is, and what they think threatens it. I think you're all unbelievable morons, frankly, and your precious status quo is a stagnant, stinking, corroded edifice of thoughtless, reactionary nepotism, financial corruption, and influence-trading, lurching treacherously in a gulping swamp of public opinion and vaguely fluffy middle-class assumptions without ONE SOLITARY enforceable, standardized rule of law to stand on. It could quite do with being burned to the ground, only it's populated by sodding _sheep_ who'd cluster in a mewling panic to start over just the same, _get back to normal,_ so what would be the _POINT?"_

He savagely hurled something seaweed-looking into his glowy green cauldron. It went up in a column of blue flame. He watched it with burning, lowering, glowering unsatisfaction.

Narcissa breathed, " _Oh,_ " and smiled.

Showing the first sign of sense she'd seen from him, Dumbledore got up, put a hand on Severus's shoulder, and stood there quietly for quite some time before he asked, in a really wanting to know voice, "What do you think we ought to be doing?"

Severus laughed hollowly. "That _can_ be done? I don't know. Everything I can think of has ripples. People," he spat, "are _comfortable_."

"And it might not be so bad if they were shaken up?"

Severus wasn't fooled by Dumbledore's mild tone, wasn't stupid enough to agree. "People think that sometimes," he said leadenly, still staring into his smoking, empty cauldron, "but it never works. Not properly. When the mob is shaken, it panics. Stampedes, or clusters to the first strong voice. Suppose you know that," he added, sliding a bitter look up. "Others certainly do."

"I wouldn't trust myself with the sort of power you're talking about," Dumbledore said quietly. "They've offered it to me three times, you know."

There was another long pause, and then Severus sagged a little. "I know," he admitted. "It's a factor." After a moment, he added irrelevantly, "Caesar was bald."

"A great temptation to a vain man, a crown," Dumbledore agreed, smiling gently. "Especially a leafy one."

"Or a school, to one who thinks he knows best." It was an accusation, but one without heat.

"I think you really did want the Defense job, Severus," Dumbledore countered, still gently, still smiling. "Didn't you?"

"I don't know," Severus said listlessly. "I like brewing, I don't want to work with people. I just see things going wrong. All the time, everything. Everyone looks like the fool in the tarot deck, dancing off cliffs. Everyone. I see him everywhere I turn, all the time, _all the time_. All those kids, no idea how to _look_."

"Or how to live for themselves, after being taken care of and loved by their parents," Dumbledore said.

"Not always," Severus muttered, dark.

"Even more need, in such cases, to learn to live for oneself," Dumbledore said, "and how to have a family of friends."

Severus turned his head away, his hands clenching.

"Severus," Dumbledore said, grave. "I'm here because you want me to be. We both know that. Now tell me why."

Another silence, even longer. Finally, sounding on the verge of tears, Severus gritted, "My friends don't want to be monsters. And neither do I. I don't want them dead, either. I can see the way the wind's blowing."

"You don't ask not to die yourself?" Dumbledore asked after another, shorter pause.

"Who do you think you are, God?" Severus asked rudely. "You think I think you are?" Then he caught himself, and amended, "Er, I mean, that would be nice, of course, if at all possible. Sorry, yes, I'd better ask for that or they'll kill me, although," his lip curled, "I'm not stupid, I hope. I don't expect miracles. But," he turned his head to give Dumbledore a tired, clear-eyed look, all his temper drained, "if I had the right to risk anyone else, I wouldn't. You understand? I don't give a _damn_ what they want, _or_ how they feel about it. You don't _tempt_ them. You deal with _me._ "

"Good boy," Narcissa approved, the nightmare image of Dumbledore and Evan twinkling and flirting at each other like fencers until Reggie collapsed in a whimpering, twitching heap of _oh dear Merlin what is expected of me now_ and Severus tore all his hair out trying to anticipate everything dissipating.

"I think we shall deal very well together," Dumbledore agreed, squeezing his shoulder with another of those fond _I made you up myself_ looks. "And I believe I can undertake to protect anyone who will willingly… make contributions, let us say. To provide some protections," he amended. "Unless you wish anyone sent into protective custody, as it were, it will have to be managed on a case by case basis."

"Evans talked to you?" Severus asked—abruptly, Narcissa thought. "I told her to, but I didn't want to make contact to check, it would have looked…"

"She's being taken care of," Dumbledore assured him, looking at him oddly. "Lily Potter is already one of mine, you know. I thought you did know."

"Of course I know," Severus said, sounding as if he'd be snapping again if he weren't so tired. "But it won't have occurred to her to look for protection. Probably not even, yet, that she'd be wise to extract a promise on the sprog's behalf, the trusting little Gryffie twit. So I'm doing it."

"But not on her husband's?" Dumbledore asked lightly, amused.

"If that bastard were on fire I'd make sure the putting-it-out water was salted," Severus said harshly. "I leave it to you to determine whether it's a clever distribution of resources to, when you're committed to protecting the very young mother of a helplessly immobile infant, allow anything to happen to," he sneered, "the handfast lover oathbound to look after her, whose loss would leave her unaccountably devastated and impoverished of judgment. Due to blind insanity."

"I see," said Dumbledore, obviously trying not to laugh. "A point worth considering, certainly."

"Not to mention how likely she would be to forget all sense and put herself in danger to get him out of it," said Mr. Helpful.

"Oh, no, we wouldn't want to mention that."

"We really didn't want to," Severus agreed, making a face. "But we thought perhaps we'd better. …Narcissa's a young mother, too," he added suddenly, almost angrily, though not at Dumbledore, almost blurting it.

"Best you could do, darling," Narcissa sighed, "I understand." _Evan_ could have convinced Dumbledore that Lucius would work for him, very very quietly, and she probably could have. It was best all around, though, since Lucius not only absolutely wouldn't but wouldn't understand and would be alarmed, that Severus not try. There was ambition, and then there was overreach and not knowing your limits.

"Mm," Dumbledore hummed. They looked at each other for a moment, and Narcissa thought Dumbledore looked almost pitying, as if he appreciated Severus's position. Passing over the whole issue, which was answer enough in itself and at least not an interrogation, he said, "You called Mr. Rosier your partner. Did you mean that in the sense of a working partner and trusted ally?"

"Yes," Severus agreed, evidently mildly surprised that there might be anything more to say on the subject. He was putting it on so Dumbledore would feel awkward about doubting him, of course, but Narcissa still wanted to pinch his cheek.

Assuming she could find something to pinch. There was a lot of bone, of course.

"His father—"

"I don't know his father very well," Severus said, still firmly. "I know Evan. Evan's on my side." Dumbledore opened his mouth, probably to ask what sort of qualifiers Severus wanted to put on that, and Severus repeated, with more emphasis, "Evan's on my side. Anyway, he doesn't like fuss or filth. He doesn't like the way things seem to be headed, either. He gets annoyed with people who stir up trouble."

Dumbledore gave him a _this is really far more serious than that_ look, dubious.

" _Quite_ annoyed," Severus assured him, mouth quirking a little. "It's an aesthetic thing."

This was pushing it, Narcissa considered. Evan invariably did his best to ignore trouble unless actually asked for help, possibly on the premise that it was only trying to make him react out of mischief and would go away if he wasn't any fun. Even when asked for help his reaction was usually to shove Severus in the general direction of the fuss, unless it was serious, definitely on the premise that Severus enjoyed shouting at people and Evan enjoyed watching. She supposed it would look different to Severus, though, since once he was involved Evan's best became nonexistent.

"Well," Dumbledore said, still looking dubious. "If he will undertake to help."

Severus shook his head. "It can't work like that. You don't understand Slytherin. Not," he added more than a little snidely, that this is news."

"What should I understand right now?" Dumbledore asked patiently. But not Patiently, which was a good sign, Narcissa thought, and it won a just-an-answer from Severus, sans bristling.

"He wants to help, and he _will_ help _me_. Reggie—I mean, Regulus Black will be inclined to help me and do what I ask, too, although he might really need protective custody whether he wants it or not."

"You see?" Narcissa asked Melly. "I keep _telling_ him he's one of us, but will he listen?"

Melly dared a grin at her. It was timid, but underneath that it was bright. "Oh, Master Very is knowing he is one of _us,_ Mistress," she said slyly.

Narcissa laughed, though she wondered why the elves called him that. His atrocious mother did, she knew from reading his mail at school, but her elves wouldn't know that. Of course, it was the most elf-like name one could make out of 'Severus.' That one could make safely, at least; Narcissa had tried to teach him his place by calling him Sevvie once, when they were still learning each other.

Even though he'd seemed a bit sorry to disappoint Evan (who, as Narcissa had explained, might have been less truculent being about called Evvie himself if it had been a paired thing, and Narcissa was _not_ going to call them Ev-and-Anything-That-Mudblood-Cow-Called-Severus), it had been Narcissa who'd done the learning that time. She'd learned that there were limits. Honestly, she'd been glad about that once she'd stopped pouting and punishing him: doormats were often extremely useful, but they weren't friends.

"But they can't be asked," Severus was explaining, frowning carefully as he tried to make Dumbledore understand the alphabet, "they can't agree, it can't be put to them as helping you or, god forbid, anything with the word 'side' anywhere near it. Narcissa's different, she has protections they don't."

"Such as?"

Severus looked at him with a sour glint of humor and said, instead of anything important, "She's a young, blonde homemaking socialite who does a lot of charity work, is the youngest daughter in a family which is a lesser branch of a Noble House, and she's married to an up-and-comer with a dominating personality with whom she never argues like a fishwife in public. Very easily underestimated.

" _They_ ," he went on, "are heirs, and people expect things. Including that they answer any question put to them, without appearing to dodge or letting anyone speak for them."

"Really, darling, we've all met you," Narcissa murmured, smiling. "No one expects Evvie to stir himself to tell anyone what _time_ it is."

"They can't have that in their memory," he was telling Dumbledore emphatically. She reminded himself that in this case he wasn't Ignoring Her, he really couldn't hear. " _I_ can't have only _this_ in my memory, to explain how I secured your goodwill. We're going to have to do something about that if you want to show an acquaintance openly. Give me something else to show, that is. You have to allow things to go unspoken, and to ensure that what's seen be explained acceptably. If you need their word, if you can't take mine, this won't work."

"But you asked me for a promise," Dumbledore pointed out, frowning.

"Case by case," Severus reminded him. "In Rome, speak Latin. Do not speak Latin in Kyoto. Even Narcissa was trying to speak Obvious with you." He laughed, just one breath and not as if he thought it was funny. "It was a very difficult gesture of goodwill for her, and I suppose you didn't even notice. To a Slytherin, that sort of thing would have _screamed._ "

"And I'd already had a headache," Narcissa agreed plaintively.

"Mistress is wanting a potion?" Melly asked.

"No," she replied. She was feeling better out of the sun, with her drink, not having to deal with the old lion herself. Severus's had been enough; his usually were. "But another limeade."

"And here's the thing," Severus was saying to Dumbledore, with an air of having sardonically watched him be taken aback for a while. "She knew perfectly well that her subtext was probably too subtle for you to notice, but she is, I guarantee you, offended anyway, on some level, that you didn't realize she was putting herself out for you and making a gesture of good faith. Because everyone she generally deals with without thinking of as a patsy would have understood. And meanwhile _you_ thought she was being oblique and dramatically mysterious for effect, possibly as a power play, didn't you."

Dumbledore didn't answer, but she could see the startled agreement in his eyes. She was, in fact, she realized, offended, but Severus sounded so much as though all this was to be expected…

"Looking back," Severus said wearily, beginning to pack up his cauldron and things, "half my problems with Lily were unavoidable, but the other half were because we were constantly talking past each other, speaking different dialects without realizing it. Each of us thinking we'd said everything that needed saying, not realizing she wasn't _hearing_ half of what I was saying, and probably the other way around, too. Wager you sickles to scones you're having that problem with eight out of ten politicians and Slytherins you have to deal with. Probably all the ones you think are dense, or posturingly maneuvering, or you can't get through to them, or that they dislike you. Or nearly all," he added judiciously. "Some of them might be unrelatedly dense. And," the corner of his mouth went wicked, "dislike you."

"Horace has never mentioned anything of the sort," Dumbledore mused.

Severus snorted. "Well, he wouldn't, would he," he said sourly. "He's used to you, and he's already worked out how to talk to you to keep you pleased with him. He's quite happy being your networking/public relations/cleanup man. Besides which, he wouldn't like anyone telling _him_ it would be useful to reconsider his approach at his age, so he won't tell you. He can be criticized easily, but not for bad manners. In any case, he probably reckons it's a lost cause. So do I, incidentally, my head's just magnetically attracted to brick walls, can't be helped."

"Or perhaps you wondered," Dumbledore speculated, "whether I would recognize a 'gesture of good faith' once alerted to how they can be snuck in."

"Anything's possible," Severus allowed, looking a bit cheered.

"So you think I need a translator," the older wizard mused.

"No, you _could use_ a translator. _I need_ one. Which is why, if you want me to be of any use, you'll do everything in your considerable power to keep Evan Rosier safe," Severus said wryly.

"No truer word, darling," said Narcissa ruefully, having suffered through his various attempts to be appropriately social at every party she'd ever forced him to come to. Especially the one celebrating Belby hiring him, where he'd been convinced that the best way to be appropriately social was to hide in the kitchens with the elves, teaching them to make drinks that would never be seen in the Manor again no matter _how_ Lucius hinted.

" _You_ ," he went on, "need a paradigm shift, or possibly to spend a month bunking down with the Slytherin firsties."

"That does sound pleasant—"

"You'd think," Severus muttered darkly.

"—but I do have other duties."

"Is it still a griffin if its eagle half is a chicken?" Severus asked no one in particular, with one of his sudden blink-and-you'll-miss-it sly, warm, teasing grins, usually reserved for Reggie. Evan could read them in his eyes, without his mouth getting involved, he only rarely dared to tease Narcissa, and Lucius didn't earn them often.

"A better question," Dumbledore added on cheerfully, "is 'can it get off the ground.' And on that note, Severus, if we're in accord?"

One more long, airless moment. Severus, no longer smiling, took a deep breath, and then another, and swallowed, and closed his eyes. Jerkily, he nodded once. Narcissa swallowed, too.

"Then come with me." Dumbledore held out his hand. "There are formalities that will guard us both, and then we'll have much to discuss."

"Where are we going," Severus didn't quite ask, very obviously past second thoughts and onto seventh or eighth ones.

"I am, as you see," Dumbledore gestured to his uncharacteristically tasteful robes, "come in my capacity as Supreme Mugwump. The mugwump who generally serves as my right hand in Confederation matters, while in Britain, is waiting for me at Hogwarts. He'll serve as witness and bonder."

"Bonder. Hogwarts," Severus echoed, like a curse. "Should have gone to school at Nelson bloody Grammar." But he took Dumbledore's arm, and then they were gone.

Narcissa didn't really think her spell would make it through an apparition and past Hogwarts' wards, but it was worth waiting to see. No joy, as it turned out, but although she was worried by having Severus out of touch under the circumstances, she hadn't really expected anything else.

She sighed, and lay down on his bed. "Melly, go out to the Quidditch pitch and make sure of when Lucius and Regulus's next bout will be," she directed. "Fifteen minutes before they come on, come back with iced coffee and wake me up. You may go to make the appointment at Amanuensis while waiting, if time allows."

She darkened the room and lay quietly, but before long she had to call the elf back to bring her Draco to cuddle. It wasn't that she didn't think Severus could handle himself with Dumbledore, even with the unknown quantity, not really. But it was all unsettling, and she hadn't expected her day to be anything like this, and now she was committed.

She _wanted_ to be committed. It was for the best to have someone in the family on each side of the political divide, so as to have allies and leverage whoever won. It was her duty to make the friends her husband and sister wouldn't, especially now she had a child with an uncertain future to look after. She was, really, quite pleased with the way things were shaping up.

Only she hadn't planned it this way, and she didn't care much for working on the fly. She trusted Severus to do his best for her and be brilliant, but she didn't trust him to _know_ what he was doing, or be able to explain it clearly to anyone if he had to. She trusted Evan to mean well, when he meant anything at all, and to move carefully, but not to put her first. Second, maybe, but not a close second like Severus would. She didn't trust Dumbledore at all. Or Regulus, although that wasn't his fault or for want of trying, poor pet. And certainly not Bella. Now even less than usual.

Mama and Papa and Uncle Orion and Aunt Callisto had no real clue, the darlings, while Andi and the baby were, thank Morgana, well out of everything (she thought, she hoped!). Aunt Walburga had taken so strongly against the Dark Lord since Kreacher had died that Reggie was torn all to pieces between her and Bella.

As for Uncle Darius, he was a very nice man, but he'd Sorted with the Dark Lord, was as much his friend as anyone in the world could claim to be, and, well, Evvie had come by his vague, lazy-looking inscrutability honestly.

Uncle Darius might very well understand matters in the light that Narcissa was helping Severus with his assigned spying-on-Dumbledore mission. But then again, he might very quietly take things the way Bella more noisily would. And, once he'd decided how to look at the situation, he might decide to be loyal to his heir or to the old friend he was pledged to, might decide to care a little or a lot or not at all. Impossible to read, impossible to know. Not a safe person to confide in at all.

And she wouldn't trouble Lucius and make him worry about her even if she could have trusted him not to give everything away. Most of the time her husband's inability to keep from telegraphing his opinions and feelings made her life much easier than it might have been… and it did, now, too, she supposed. It stopped her feeling guilty about keeping things from him, from wondering whether she was making the right decision. She knew she was.

On all counts. Still… she hadn't meant today to be in any way important. Hadn't expected to be concerned about anything more pressing than getting photographed for the society pages at a less than ideal angle, or Evvie giving himself heatstroke from painting everything in sight without moving for twelve hours straight.

This, she thought darkly even as she crooned over her enthusiastically hungry baby and his soft, soft cheek, was what she got for making friends with a Capricorn with his moon in Aquarius. A depressive, pessimistic, rational-clairvoyant of a panicky idealist who saw Terrible Problems everywhere and dived after them with his giant nose twitching, like a niffler after gold, without a safety line, so his friends had to scrabble after him with bandages instead of anything remotely resembling dignity. That was what she got. It was a _ridiculous_ situation for a good Slytherin girl to find herself in, and anyone who wanted to tell her she ought to have known better would have had a point.

But it wasn't her fault, she told herself. They'd already been friends more than a year before they'd started Astrology in Divination. And while you _could_ just drop someone if they weren't worth it, she wouldn't have been happy about it. He'd been the first friend she'd ever had who had ideas of his own (Evvie and Reggie never had any, and her roommates and Andi had been utterly _conventional,_ getting all theirs from Witch Weekly and tediously overheated potboilers, which didn't count at all, although at least Lucy was energetic and fun with it) which didn't revolve around hurting people on the premise that it would be funny. Naming no sisters' or cousins' names.

Narcissa had been utterly sick of everyone at Hogwarts but Evan (who wasn't excepted because she'd particularly liked him. Rather he'd been so constantly off in cloud-cuckoo-land back then that he'd barely registered, and was therefore marginally more restful than dull) by the time she'd discovered that the scruffy, awful, filthy-looking peasant who'd come to school sounding like he had rags stuffed in his nose and thistles in his mouth was really more droll than troll. Was secretly, once he was sure you wouldn't mock him for it or use his work against him, not merely good at his schoolwork but wickedly clever with his wand, and so fierce over the children that she'd been quite sorry he was so very much too ugly and possibly-mudblooded to be fanciable.

The complete lack of money wouldn't have been a problem: she was a Black, and even without her full attention he was doing reasonably well with his little patents and investments, considering that he'd been living on a stipend since they'd graduated. It wouldn't have mattered that he didn't seem to see her in that way any more than she did him, either. If she'd needed him to take potions for her, she knew he would have.

But he wasn't at his best when he was miserable, and for all she was sure his blood was purer than he thought it was, even the chance… and that _face!_ Even without the horrible yellowing soap (she touched Draco's little nose protectively, smiled to see it wrinkle, bent down and kissed his beautiful wisps of pale hair). Evvie was really an extremely strange boy, but she was glad they were pleased and that neither had attached himself to anyone more unsuitable than Severus.

This had been a serious concern in fourth year, when Severus had been mooning and banging his head against the wall as much over the Evans chit as over Evvie—albeit with frustrated, tongue-tied arguments in place of cold showers, when it came to the marmalade cow. Which had been a relief to everyone but Evvie, who hadn't so much as noticed until nearly the end of fifth ear, the idiot.

Largely because he'd been running the serious matrimonial risk of allowing very nearly anyone who expressed an interest to take him under the bleachers, up the Astronomy tower, or behind the greenhouses. He'd even let himself be petted by treacle-sweet Huffie girls who looked at his face, Quidditch build, and family holdings, interpreted his usually vague expression as _dreamy_ or _biddable_ , decided he was only a Slytherin nominally, because his parents had been one and he wasn't a hard worker, and fixated on him as the boy of their dreams. At least he'd had the sense to avoid Narcissa's roommates—other than Lucy, who was safe enough.

Narcissa was still surprised Severus hadn't tried to kill or at least scalp anybody, but maybe he hadn't thought he had a right back then. He'd had other problems, anyway.

Even before that, back when they were twelve, before she'd known how much use he'd be, she'd been so glad to have a friend with an active brain who could make her laugh that she didn't think she would have dropped him even if she _had_ known how much trouble he'd let her in for. It really was quite a lot of trouble, of course. But then, to do herself justice, he'd actually been trouble right from the start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes** : Despite appearances, this fic has still not gone AU. I know it looks that way, but keep calm, slither on, and see if you can spot where Severus explains why it hasn't.  
> eta: And don't read the chapter's comments if you want to figure it out yourself. (g)
> 
> The thing with the ley lines is not a direct explanation for but derives from the question of _Why the heck didn't a reasonably competent Slytherin who could see the way the way things were going and didn't like it just get the hell out of Dodge?_ More on this later; for now let it suffice that it's not _totally_ psychosomatic.


	59. Staffroom, Hogwarts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Albus kinda-sorta hugely regrets Team Slytherclaw well before the ink is dry, and Severus would rather be a snake-mole than a frog on a log.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : Some language. Lots of geeking out. And References. Seriously, I'm not even going to bother citing them at the end, because I expect you people to recognize Original Source Excellence when you see it. ;P
> 
>  **Q &A**: I hope everyone to whom it's relevant had a happy thanksgiving and/or Guy Fawkes Day (I say and/or, you British people, because of the V for Vendetta following over here). Because of all the references I was going to go with a theme of _geekery_ to rhyme with last post's [sneakery](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2380514/chapters/6049445), but then I thought, we're having A Farewell to _Autumn_ here (especially in New York. Keep warm, youse guys... or dry, at least)... so, you know, whichever moves ya. :D

When Albus and his passenger came in, the first thing Severus (dear Merlin, _Severus Snape,_ Albus might have warned him!) did was stare. Then he said, rather gleefully, " _Ha!"_ and finally added, "Yes," as though he were asking a question someone had asked.

"Yes?" Filius repeated weakly.

"Yes," Severus clarified, "whatever Professor Dumbledore did to make you gloat at Professor Slughorn so he'd have to find a way to one-up you was absolutely done on purpose. I knew it had been as soon as Professor Slughorn came around to invite me to the conference," he added apologetically, "but I thought you must have been in on it 'till I saw your face just now. Sorry."

"Oh," Filius said, feeling his forehead do odd things. Severus's essays had always had a problem with transitions and background-definitions, as well. He assumed one could keep up. Filius generally could, even when Severus also assumed that he didn't have to make a citation because _he_ hadn't had to look the fact up and therefore it must be general knowledge.

Still, it was an awful habit. No one had ever been able to explain to him that one was supposed to write essays as if explaining the subject to an incoming class of slightly younger students, not as if trying to have an enthused discussion with one's professors on their own level of understanding. He tended to react to this suggestion as though the professor in question was being lazy for wanting the same essay from every student in each Nth-year class over and over (Minerva), too stupid to be comfortable with one that strayed outside the textbook (Silvanus, and just possibly Horace, although of course Horace hadn't complained about any Sodding Snape Commentary he'd come in for where _Filius_ could hear), or insulting Severus's own intelligence—Filius himself, and the boy had been very hurt and surly about it for the rest of the month.

Even explaining that part of what Severus was supposed to come away from school with was the ability to communicate with people less knowledgeable than himself hadn't helped, because Severus had flat-out refused to entertain the premise even long enough to explain which part of it he was having the problem with.

This was not the time to re-open that discussion, even for the sake of a former student's future relationship with the professional journals. So Filius instead queried, "'Ha'?"

"You don't publish, hardly at all," Severus explained happily. "And you don't have many patents out, at least, not in public records, but all the Ravenclaws I knew were always complaining that you barely had more office hours than Professor McGonagall. But Narcissa says you don't have a spouse or a steady and you're not out all the time for casual socializing, either, and she'd know. And when I was asking around about Charms mastery requirements last year, ICE was awfully smug about you, and they don't have a lot of respect for work that only passes on existing charms. I knew you had to be moonlighting undercover _somehow_."

Filius looked helplessly at Albus, who was chuckling. Finally, he voiced his first thought, reproachfully. "You might have warned me, Chief."

"Oh, no," Albus said, sobering. "No, no, that wouldn't have done at all. I couldn't be sure until he agreed to come. And if I'd told anyone, no matter how trusted, that any given person was probably," he waved an airy hand, "involved, or about to be, then that person would have been wrong to trust me."

"Correct," Severus said darkly, and eyed Filius, clearly suspecting he ought to be offended or hurt. "What do you mean, he ought to have _warned_ you?"

"I mean," Filius said, cross with his boss, "that generally when Albus tells me he's bringing in a new recruit for MI-20," (Severus started, and stared at Albus) "it's a fifty-year-old Auror who's sick of the Ministry, a thirty-year old Gringotts' cursebreaker who's fed up with goblins, an applicant to the Department of Mysteries they thought would be too energetic around the delicates, a mugwump from another country's division who's finding his or her usual area too hot, or a wide-eyed Gryffindor or Hufflepuff fresh off his NEWTs, who generally needs to be soundly discouraged. I do not expect twenty-one year old Slytherins who were raised on Sun Tsu, Mervyn Peake, Conan Doyle, Roddenberry, Asimov, and Paracelsus." He considered, and added thoughtfully, "I don't think anyone does."

"No one expects the Spanish Inquisition," Severus muttered under his breath, as if he just couldn't help himself. Hotly, presumably because Slytherin brainwashing made him ashamed of these things, even if it hadn't been strong enough to convince him the excellent wasn't worthwhile, he demanded (and it was a demand), "You cannot possibly have any reason to think I even know what those—"

"Certainly I can," Filius interrupted him, grinning up. "Griselda Marchbanks mentioned some references you made in your OWLs and NEWTs. Right in front of the Rosier boy, too. Careless, one would have thought."

"Sun Tsu was decidedly pre-Separation, especially in his own country," Severus maintained, giving his very best mule imitation.

"Mmm," Filius hummed noncommittally. "Speaking of Evan Rosier, he asked me to teach him the geminus charm after you had him draw you Vulcan—"

"No one ever said—!"

"Oh, all right, _with pointy ears and eyebrows and no expression over a mountainous desert background,_ and I said I didn't teach that charm to students but I'd do the spell for him."

Severus now looked mostly as if he were trying not to be amused that Filius had both caught and remembered the significance of the craggy mountains, so Filius continued as if it didn't matter, because it didn't. "Too many children try to learn it to cheat on notes, you understand. Sometimes I'll look the other way when I think a good copy will help them, but he wasn't a bad student when—"

"When we could make him do the bloody work," Severus finished for him, rolling his eyes. "Or when he actually _had_ to do the written work to understand the subject practically; we didn't have to prod him in almost anything but Charms and DADA. Well, and History, but that doesn't count. Er, and Transfiguration; he said doing the reading confused everything and I should stop, too. But he didn't coast in Runes or Arithmancy. Or Astronomy."

"In which subject, as I recall, you wrote a reconstruction of Dynamics of an Asteroid for your final in your fourth year," he remembered nostalgically, refusing to let ridiculous Slytherin attitudes about good books have any place in this room, where they all knew better. "Professor Timaeus nearly tore all his hair out trying to track down your 'citations' in the library before he gave up and started asking around."

Severus flushed.

"Nice usage of Charles Dodgson, I thought," Filius added, still grinning but making a more than half-arsed attempt to sound consoling. "Not _entirely_ appropriate, mathematically, but thematic. Might have been a better paper if you'd used any 20th century sources, though."

Severus mumbled something that sounded like _shite month_ and _Evans thought it was funny_.

"So did Professor Binns," Filius told him cheerfully.

Severus looked thoroughly affronted.

"And finally, you deduced me when you came in," he added, smirking. "Bit of a giveaway."

"I didn't say one word about your shirt cuffs or the knees of your trousers or _anything!_ "

Filius looked at him.

"… _Dammit!"_

"If you're quite finished making Severus turn funny colors," Albus prompted tolerantly. He'd acquired a tea tray while they talked. As he did.

"But they're very unusual funny colors, he's so pale," Filius explained, hopping up onto the sofa.

"This is hazing, isn't it," Severus posited glumly, slumping into the armchair Minerva normally took. Filius wondered whether that was an instinct for what was likely to irritate her, or because her build was the most like his and therefore her chair looked the most comfortable to him.

"Well, my boy," Albus said, being kind in that way he had that made everyone want to strangle him, as Minerva put it, with his own beard, "you do realize, I trust, who you may have to work with. Depending on the circumstances, and what plans we settle on. We have to explore your response to unexpected discomfiture."

There was a short pause. Sourly, Severus asked, "And are you planning to warn _them_? Because I'm not the one who starts things, you know. You can ask Sl—Professor Slughorn. The last time he invited me to one of his Slug Club meetings I didn't say a _word_ and we _still_ all ended up in detention."

"I have no plans at all, yet," Albus said sedately. "We shall have to understand your position and your prospects, before making any."

"And before we can discuss them," Severus shot back, eyes narrow, "those assurances we discussed will have to be cemented. In marble. In _diamond_."

"He doesn't trust me," Albus explained to Filius. Unusually for him, it was a simple statement of fact, not a mockery of sorrow.

"I told you, you don't understand Slytherin," Severus told him, equally just-explaining. "It's not a matter of even thinking about whether I trust you, particularly, or not. I'm negotiating for _my people's_ _safety_. As I negotiate, even if I trust you implicitly in everything, like a Hufflepuff, I must assume that you'll have an unexpected heart attack tomorrow, probably from too many sweets. Or be struck by lightning next month, while I'm in the middle of something you asked me to do which is extremely delicate and which no one else knows about. I have to anticipate that at some unknown point, our deal will have to bind some successor in your place. Because the when is unknown, even if you know who your successor is now, your successor _at the relevant point is still a complete unknown._ They therefore can't, at _this_ moment, be trusted at all. And even until then our arrangement will have to bind your followers, who, as you know perfectly well, won't trust me however much they trust you, and still wouldn't if I pulled them out of a fire while there were no witnesses and I could not possibly profit by it."

Filius asked Albus, full of a sudden rabid curiosity, "Are we introducing him to Alastor?"

"No," Albus said emphatically.

_"Please?"_

Albus took off his spectacles and rubbed his crooked nose.

"Is this the Alastor that you said, not twenty minutes ago, that you 'really must introduce me to'?" Severus asked with wide eyed, sadistic curiosity.

"A figure of speech," Albus said firmly. "Severus, would you be more comfortable discussing the arrangements you hope for with Professor Flitwick?"

Severus eyed the Headmaster. "I would _be_ comfortable discussing them with him," he said, in what Filius could see was a truly exhausting effort at tact, "if he has all the information and authority needed to draw up a draft agreement. I'll need your oath in the end, though. One that, as I said, will bind your followers and successors."

"Of course, of course," Albus agreed, and moved to his own usual armchair. He flicked his wand at the air in front of him. His office desk appeared, complete with quill-stand, inkwell, and piles of scrolls. He sighed at them for a moment, and then settled down to work.

"It's still summer," Severus noted, looking at the piles.

It wasn't a question, so Filius didn't answer it.

After another moment, Severus asked, nodding his chin at the desk, "Is that lot typical?"

"More or less," Filius grimaced. "Confederation paperwork and reports from agents on current missions, Wizengamot cases to review, Ministry correspondence… and his position would require him to keep up with the fields he's known for, of course, even if you could pull him away from the alchemy and technomancy journals with an expelliarmus and a crowbar."

"And that's in addition to the academic administration?" Severus was frowning, but Filius couldn't read his thoughts in it.

He smiled dryly. "Minerva was most apologetic about being appointed Deputy Headmistress over the rest of our heads. We very _sincerely_ told her we didn't mind in the least."

Another frowning pause. "Transfiguration has the most homework, after Runes."

"There is a lot of theory in it," Filius pointed out.

"I think I see," Severus said darkly.

"…Yes?"

"Yes," he said, looking extremely depressed. "Only, I suspect I'm about to have Enough Problems, copyright, trademark, proprietary brand logo, even if anyone were to admit it's still my business."

"….Alllll… right…" Filius said, slowly, eyebrow rising.

"Only I do think you might at least _consider_ a secretary," Severus burst out crossly. "If Filch isn't completely redundant in a castle full of elves, no one understands how, so one would think a little administrative assistance could be fit into the budget somehow."

"It's been suggested," Filius admitted instead of explaining about janitorial oversight and having a living not-servile non-elf whose nearly-sole job it was to walk the castle beat and keep an eye on things. He didn't blame Filch for getting cranky when an Obvious Mess kept him in one place too long by the pretext, especially since wizarding kids thought smells were funny and Filch couldn't just charm dungbomb residue away.

Not that he understood why Severus was fixating, especially at this point in time. "Let's just say that Albus, after observing some of Headmaster Dippet's challenges, came in with a preference for minimizing the opportunities for a Ministry-associated presence at Hogwarts. Capable administrators in Wizarding Britain tend to be Ministry trained."

"…Hm."

"Hmm," Filius agreed. "Now, what's this about coming to an arrangement? Generally our hopefuls fill out an application, run an obstacle course, sleep in front of Albus's door for a week until he gets tired of telling them to go home…"

"I'm not _applying to be a mugwump,_ " Severus recoiled, cross as two sticks on a chapel roof. " _Christ_ what a word. Sounds like a frog on a log."

"It meant war leader, originally," Filius said mildly. "Algonquin, I believe."

"Well, I'm a brewer," Severus grumped. "English, though most likely of Germanic derivation. It means throws things in a pot so they turn into magic. Or occasionally alcohol. Professor Dumbledore and I want to use each other's connections, that's all."

"Oh, is that all," murmured Albus from across the room. Severus made a face in his direction.

"Ah," Filius nodded, "single-mission consultant's contract."

Severus looked taken aback. At being pigeon-holed, Filius thought. "Possibly?"

"Well, when I say 'single-mission.'" He conjured up a desk and writing materials of his own and dipped his quill. "Now, you're looking for protection of some sort, not remuneration, is that right?"

" _Can_ I get remuneration?" Severus asked with more drollery than optimism.

"Let's put it this way," Filius said judiciously. "It's not unknown, particularly for single _brief_ -mission consultants. Is he taking you on for something likely to be simple or quick?"

Severus considered, and answered with horrible, brittle brightness, "I could die. It _might_ be quick. They have cyanide teeth in the stories."

"Let's avoid that," Filius said drolly. "He'd shove the paperwork at me. So much paperwork. With copies for MI-20, the ICW, the Minister's Office, the DMLE, the Census Bureau… oh, dear Merlin, you were raised in the Muggle world, weren't you? So that would be _two_ Census Bureaus…"

Severus laughed, nearly silently, and then scowled horribly in pretend offense. He looked, as intended, a little reassured.

Filius smiled back, and picked up his quill again. "It's expected that expenses will be paid, if justified and reasonable, including time put in for R&D. There's a," he waved a hand, "roll of parchment in the heap here somewhere, I'll show you. And career agents without day jobs do take in a salary, unless they can afford not to and choose to waive it. But—"

"The culture of the service means a mercenary approach sacrifices goodwill?" Severus guessed with a cynical smile. Filius nodded, shrugging. "Of course it does. Glory and graciousness, officers and gentlemen: always a rich man's game. And, as a Slytherin among those who consider themselves aeons more worthy in all ways…"

Filius spread his hands. "If it helps," he said, "I had to waive my R&D fees for nearly five years to keep half the department from knifing me in the back. Mostly metaphorically, I _think_. Goblin blood, you know; people assume. And it was worse, back in the forties."

"Especially being Jewish, you mean," Severus concluded with a highly misanthropic tired expression. Filius shrugged and he sighed, a nostril flaring. "You got it back retroactively, I trust?" He didn't look as though he was trusting anything even a little bit.

Filius smiled at him. "Not precisely or officially, but Albus has his ways. And when I'd been there long enough, the same people who would have grumbled about me at first started grumbling _for_ me."

"Mm." Severus looked over at Albus and his paperwork for a moment, lips pursed. "Did he bother sharing with the faculty that I'd applied for the Defense job?"

"Severus, it wasn't like that," Filius protested.

Severus blinked. "'Like that'?"

They looked at each other. "What did you mean, did he bother?"

Severus shrugged. "Oh, I didn't imagine I was a strong contender. My experience isn't the sort most employers would recognize, all quite informal, and, er, there were some… my interview didn't end on the most professional note."

"Middling, comparatively," Filius said judiciously, itching with curiosity. "We had some _very_ strong contenders. We usually do, lately; the post's been open so often since Albus took over that it's a bit of a hot job. The senior faculty discusses all of the applicants for staff positions, though. So, yes, we knew you'd applied."

Severus nodded. "I mention it because my current position could go away," he said. "Which would be terrible for a number of reasons, most of which don't particularly involve me. But one of them is that it's _really not a good idea_ for a brewer of my talents and House to be known, given the way things seem to be moving, either to have too much free time or to be open to becoming financially dependent on the wrong people." He was looking in Albus's direction, still, but not really at him, Filius thought.

"You need to understand," he went on grimly. "The protections I need aren't all simply legal, and it's complicated, but I'm not being devious when I tell you that I believe giving them will protect more than me and mine. In a very real, tangible, and urgent way."

Filius's skin crawled. He suddenly remembered, vividly, the unformed, awkward way Severus's face had looked at eleven. The way it had lit up when he'd gotten his first wanded spell right and made that feather fly and do cartwheels for him, and the way it had instantly closed down in case anyone saw him committing the Slytherin-only sin of Having An Expression. The almost wounded, full-eyed expression of uncomprehending gratitude when Filius had refused to let him act like a miniature pariah and take the lessons he coveted only on the sly.

"Hair on your neck standing up?" Severus asked him out of a much longer, harsher, pared-down face, bitterly conversational, and didn't wait for him to nod. "Good. Not high enough, I expect. That is to say, I've managed to convince them all that I am, while imaginative, in practice a squeamish, missish little swot who belongs in your House, but eventually one of them will remember that I'm fluent in the spellcasting languages and, for example, the spell I meant for a safety blade _will_ cut arteries with the right wandwork, and its cuts do not close with an episkey. And they'll stop thinking about what my friends are really like as people, and remember," he snarled, "that those friends are _Blacks_. And do you know what, Professor? Put them in a corner, put a wand at the wrong person's throat, and they are as dangerous as Blacks are expected to be. Every one."

"Severus," Filius said quietly. He considered pressing a cup of tea on him, but Severus was breathing shallowly, his eyes bright and glittering hotly, and this was the mood in which teacups got hurled and blackboards cracked.

"If the Project's funding was slashed and every one of my friends was disowned and Potter and Black managed to fuck my reputation so badly I couldn't get hired anywhere else in Britain," Severus snarled, "there'd still be work for me in the Sherwood. They know me there, they don't listen to anyone, they don't care about _any_ of you. Ev could sell art to _muggles_ if he had to, he doesn't need his name to sell, he's _good,_ and he knows how to paint without his wand. I don't _need_ your money. But I _do_ need to be sure that none of _them_ will ever think I need _theirs._ I can't stop at asking for legal protections, or even physical protections. We have to make sure I…"

He stopped, snarled viciously, and started again. "That I only look the correct amount of vulnerable to their machinations for what's required. _Do you understand how delicate this is?"_ he demanded, as shrill as his baritone would allow.

Filius didn't, though he believed that Severus believed it to be very much so. He was, however, more occupied with wondering whether Severus had noticed himself preferring to get penned into a tourist town job, which he would obviously hate, than go anywhere in the non-British world. He'd have to make sure he did notice, and didn't say things like that around people who'd use the blind spot against him. Impossible to find out whether the boss had noticed, too, unfortunately, without bringing it to his attention.

Albus was looking up from his paperwork, and Filius could tell he was hiding a smile under his hand and beard. "Then you are willing to look vulnerable, if it's advisable?" he clarified, not even trying not to twinkle.

"I _already_ look vulnerable, except my patronage is spoken for by possessive, rabid, sleepy basilisks no one wants to tickle, let alone poke with sticks. It's _expected,_ but it has to be _managed!_ " Severus looked ready to scream with vexation, even though no one had actually argued with him.

"Then we'll work on that as we plan," Filus said simply, and made a note. And made very sure not to look at Severus, even as he heard the click of a hanging, stupefied jaw snapping shut.

He was busy shooting a warning at the boss and his twinklies anyway. Albus really needed to stop doing that at people who were already upset; it Did Not Help. "We won't go into it now, as it'll have to be situation-dependent and it's already been decided you're not going to clarify your exact situation until you do have legal assurances. So," he reached for a new scroll, "let's talk about those."

As he explained about the renewal requirements on the various mugwump versions of carte blanche, he felt Severus's clangingly agitated presence collapse in on itself, just like any young wizard who felt he'd made a fool of himself. He poured them both some tea and ignored the crawling shame from the armchair (which stuffed itself away and got back to business more efficiently than Filius would have expected from the adult version of the student he'd had: odd but gratifying), and asked what Severus expected to be done for, and by, his friends.

The answer to the latter initially sounded like 'essentially nothing' to Filius, but Severus laughed at him. Albus proclaimed himself willing to not only extend the benefit of the doubt but make an investment so Filius, shrugging, settled to discussing what MI-20 and the Confederation could actually offer.

When Severus was satisfied, he said, in a peace-offering turn, "I realize I haven't made it sound to an out-Houser like Ev and Narcissa can do much—"

"Like a _what?_ " Filius gaped.

Severus failed at pretending he wasn't smirking and hadn't heard. "But if the things they do _looked_ like things-done, they wouldn't be effective. That's why they're brilliant. It's… it's pure extract of Slytherin, I don't understand it at all, I think they got it in their milk. They sit in a room with people, chatting about utter fluff, and the things they want just happen, as far as I can see. Untraceable. If you want to understand it you should ask Professor Slughorn, maybe he knows. He's too clumsy to do it himself, as far as I can tell, but maybe he at least knows what they're doing. I mean, there are things I can at least recognize that I can't do, so. And it might even just not be his preferred style. I don't know whether I'd do it all the time, if I could, or still never have the patience for it, myself."

Filius wondered if he knew he looked bedazzled and besotted and as worshipful as one of the could-never-have-gone-anywhere-else Ravens who'd gotten their hot little hands on a pass to the Restricted Section for the first time, although not quite so openly greedy. He'd used to look about like that around Lily Evans.

This being irrelevant, though probably important, Filius merely smiled, and said, "Oh, I think we can take your word for it, for the moment. You realize, though, that we will be watching to see what ripples out from around them."

Severus nodded soberly, but parried, "But you realize they'll have to be giving muddied impressions, to preserve their positions. Others will be watching them as well."

"Filius," Albus put in, "I had it in mind for Severus and, let us say, his cell, to be last-resort reserves, gatherers of information when possible, but largely—"

"Snake-moles?" Severus queried, sounding whimsical but looking rather as if his knees would have been folding in relief if he hadn't already been sitting down. "What would that look like, a ferret?" he mused. "Hufflepuff will be very angry with us for horning in on their territory; after all, ferrets are polecats are Mustelidae."

"Precisely," Albus nodded agreeably, after evidently giving up on making sense of the badger-babble. He turned back to Filius, a little querulous. "I wish you all would believe me when I tell you that Tom Riddle is impatient, harsh, wasteful, watchful, and not to be toyed with or underestimated. Given a chance to place a shadowed eye near him, I would not waste it, attempting to turn it into a hand he would most certainly see moving and destroy."

"Who?" Severus frowned.

Albus regarded him. "The one you call Lord V—"

Severus jumped to his feet with his hands out and hissed, " _Shut it!_ Sir," he added belatedly, still looking disproportionately alarmed. "No, I _don't_ call him that, and let's not hear you doing it, either! Don't you know the devil comes when he's called?"

"Really, Severus, how superstitious," Dumbledore frowned, disappointed in him. "Fear in a name increases fear of the thing itself."

"I am _not_ superstitious," Severus scowled, eyes snapping. "I have my reasons."

"And they are?"

The boy's jaw tightened, and his hands and arms twitched. "I also have pre-existing oaths," he said unhappily. "Binding ones. Which," he added sharply, glaring at Dumbledore, "you don't get to complain about, after '76, or tell me I ought to have been able to avoid: bollocks, I say bollocks to that before you even _think_ to try it on me. I say bollocks and _April_. _April was catalytic rather than conclusive,_ which ought to bloody well _tell_ you something."

It didn't tell Filius anything, but it seemed to speak to Albus. Filius would wait to ask; he wouldn't get any answers while the boy was in the room with every pore screaming a demand for shame and apology. Which he wouldn't get either, obviously, but at least he seemed to know it.

"And even so," with one more extremely nasty look before he sighed and twitched his shoulders in irritable resignation, "I'll tell you what I can."

The older wizards exchanged a look. "Ah."

"Just, _do not say that name_ ," Severus pressed. "And if you're arrogant fools enough you can't stop yourself, don't do it where I can hear you, unless you _want—_ " he cut himself off, closed his mouth with another snap.

"I _see,_ " Albus nearly purred, sounding fascinated. "What an interesting diagnostic tool, Severus, among other things."

Like unprompted but not necessarily unplanned gestures of good faith, Filius thought, nearly but not quite as amused as he was pleased.

Severus slumped into a limp puddle of spindly bones in his chair. Grinning, Filius reheated his teacup for him and nudged it over. He nursed it like an alcoholic pacifier, eyes half-lidded in pleased, smug relief at Albus not being stupid, more sucking the (completely nonalcoholic) tea than sipping.

"Oolong fan?" Filius asked lightly, deciding on second thought that 'smug' wasn't quite right. Satisfied.

"You should try the báichá Madam Chang has sent in from Xi'an," Severus replied, pulling the teacup away from his face with some regret. "She won't tell me the name of the blend, says I won't come for tea anymore if I can get it on my own. But apparently she's leaving me the herbalist's floo address and a letter of introduction in her will. Which is either extraordinarily touching or tells me she hasn't heard any of the rumors about Slytherins."

"Oh, I know that stuff," Filius said. "It's—"

"Don't tell me," Severus interrupted him regretfully. "She'll know if I'm mucking her about, and she really enjoys having a wizard to matriarch at. It doesn't work on Lovegood; he doesn't even _notice_. I think she feels cheated, not being able to intimidate her son-in-law."

"There's always her daughter-in-law," Filius said dryly, sighing.

"I only ever knew Míngyùe," Severus explained, shrugging. "Her brother and his wife were both Hufflepuff, weren't they? Years ahead of me, anyway."

Albus cleared his throat gently.

"Right," Filius said guiltily, and within minutes was haggling with Severus about what he was in fact worth to Albus if, as he claimed, he was prevented from identifying Death Eaters he knew about and they didn't.

He hadn't really expected anything else. A group calling itself the _Death Eaters_ who set giants on innocent townships was clearly, despite its alchemical pretensions, heading in a terrorist direction and would be taking precautions if it hadn't taken them already. It had been worth a try, though. After all, Severus had gotten around not being supposed to tell them something else.

But, "There is a difference," Severus said, flatly exasperated, "between 'thou shalt not speak' and 'thou shalt keep secret.' Namely, the distinction between things one claims one wants secret but actually wants rabidly whispered about in hushed, awed, sweaty corners all over the world, and things one actually is set on not letting get out due the enormous tactical problems that would present. They tend to be treated rather differently, I should think one would _expect_."

"One does," Filius nodded, "but spending a moment on eliminating a long shot is less foolish than missing an opportunity."

"All right." Severus looked happier. "As long as you understand that your Alastor and I aren't the only cautious people in the empire, and I therefore can't give you life, the universe, and everything on a platinum platter studded with apatite."

"Don't Panic, we understand. But apatite's a bit cheap for a platinum platter, isn't it?" Filius asked, not bothering to hide a smile.

"But you can get a very clear teal color, which would look well with platinum," Severus said seriously, "and the cats-eye kind would give it an unusual effect. More importantly, it's used in all sorts of wit-sharpening and focusing potions, and takes similar enchantments well. I expect you could enchant such a platter so that anything served off it—"

"Boys," Albus sighed at them pointedly from his paperwork, looking less displeased than tired.

"We'll be good, Chief," Filius said mock-meekly. He did indeed make more of an effort to stay on track from then on, even though the distractions had been keeping the boy from getting antsy and nervous and snappish. Even though Severus was, while quite capable of keeping his mind on business himself, entirely _in_ capable of opening his mouth without making Filius itch to ask him something completely irrelevant.

He made a note to ask if Severus was doing this on purpose, and if he was able to do it with everyone. If so, it was quite a talent, and would probably be very useful to them under various circumstances. He didn't think Severus was trying to dodge _now_ , but…

"Er, no," Severus told him, when he got around to asking, another day. "I mostly lean loquacious because it makes most people leave me alone so as not to get lectured at about things they don't care about. You're just mental. I mean odd. Er, very Ravenish. Whiiiich is only right, of course. Sir."

Filius stared at him, and said, as sternly as his admittedly rather high tenor would permit, "That's an excuse. You do it because you do it. Kindly explain to me how Horace got you?"

And Severus looked acutely uncomfortable and muttered, "Hat thought I'd blow up the Tower poking into everyone's experiments on account of lacking all capacity for detachment—it's not an _excuse,_ you're _supposed_ to have more than one reason to do anything!"

"I shall have to have a _word_ with that hat," Filius said darkly. As if he couldn't control his own students! A little extra nosiness (no pun intended) should never have kept an egg out of his aerie. Quite the reverse. At this point, however, Severus flushed and fled, just like he had when Filius had refused to let him bow out of music club.

He did, in fact, speak to the Sorting Hat, but the dreadful old object snickered at him and said excessive curiosity had not been the problem. That it had only even allowed Severus to go to Slytherin because it had been sure a House full of reputedly ruthless purebloods would intimidate him enough not to burn down the dungeons _quite_ every thirty seconds, trying to save them from their own, darker dabbling out of being sure they were getting it wrong in a dangerous way. At last, not until he'd at least taken enough DADA not to summon anything demonic or demented by accident while 'correcting' them. Whereas Ravenclaw would have pushed him out a window by Halloween.

And though the nervous breakdowns and frequent trips to the hospital wing had been probably unavoidable, the little twerp had deserved them for doing his damnedest to set a venerable artifact like the Hat on bloody fire when he found he couldn't argue it to death, the currish, whey-faced termagant.

"Aren't you supposed to put the children where they belong?" asked Filius, who would have been eying the hat in consternation if it hadn't been on his head.

"Oh, but I _did,_ " it said smugly. "And that doesn't mean the same thing to everyone, you know. Or for everyone. Tricky, tricky proposition, belonging. I don't have to place them where they'll be comfortable. Or even where they would most clearly fit on the day they put me on, if the shape they want to grow into is one they have the potential for. If they manage it, after all, the victory will be even sweeter."

"Oh, of course. _Gryffindors,_ " Filius sighed in disgust, putting Godric's hat back on the shelf.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes** : Luna's experience could suggest that Filius isn't as good at controlling his students as he thinks he is. And/or that by 'control' he only means 'keep them from destroying the universe while matriculated.' And/or that he only recognizes/understands the male form of bullying. And/or that Luna is so well-balanced and unusual he didn't notice anything was wrong because she would have dressed differently whether or not her shoes were available, and was in fact managing fine, emotionally speaking. And/or that he was so busy with pre-war business in those years that he let his mastery of the House slide. No truth stands alone in this 'verse if I notice it trying (squinty eyes).


	60. Guest room, Petroc Hall, Dartmoor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Severus gives a pitch-perfect demonstration of Occlumency until he belly-flops the landing, absolutely no one shows any sense of decorum at all, and Regulus eats all the pastries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : There should possibly be a warning for dubcon, but it has to do with mind-magic and politics, not sex.
> 
>  **Notes** : Got finals coming up, so very glad to be able to post this first. Still soliciting questions for the characters re autumn and geekiness. Or, you know, whatever. :D
> 
> For my birthday/the holidays, I would accept with delight good wishes, story support of any type, and I would also like the opportunity to here-recognize anyone who'd like to, before the year is out, tell about having contributed to anti-bullying campaigns or fought the scourge personally (I have a broad definition of bullying which includes all forms of bashing and also cliquishness and contemptuously dismissing other people's ideas, ftr).

"I'm sorry, Reg, but I _had_ to," Severus was saying when Evan came in. "Dumbledore was poking around. Was I supposed to let him watch while I—oh, hullo," with a brief smile, he let Evan nuzzle his neck and tug one of his arms around himself.

Clearly Ev had been supposed to do more or less this: Spike was in, rather than one of the armchairs, the awful avocado-green velvet loveseat which had reproached them very politely for trying to transfigure Hall property. It didn't seem to be charmed to protest anything else they did on it, at least. Or, well, not so far. Evan had I-don't-care-about-fines plans for their final day, involving furniture he'd never have to use again. He wasn't telling Spike though; he'd have to surprise him if he didn't want both the probably-hilarious argument about seemliness and one about hygiene and consideration he'd have no answer to except magic-should-trump-magical-thinking and I-don't-care.

"While I worked on it?" Severus picked up his thread again. "You know he would have wanted to know what it was. He's an alchemist and he's got a compulsion about knowing everything about everyone; you remember how he had the elves and portraits and ghosts all snitching for him."

"You didn't have to _blow it up,_ " Reg huffed, looking more upset than he sounded. He'd grown up listening to his mother telling Sirius _I don't like your tone._ "You're always so _dramatic,_ Spike!"

"Reg," Severus explained at him, sounding stressed, "what was I supposed to do? Leave it there? At an event full of brewers, at least two-thirds of whom would feel no compunction about and snitching secrets, formulas, and _samples_ they could get their hands on? We know we have no idea who else is of our number, and neither—" he glanced at Evan, "none of us is supposed to know anything about this."

"You could have—"

"What, taken it with me? He'd have asked about it. Oh, probably just from curiosity and politeness to begin with, but he's far too good to lie to about potions."

"And you shouldn't try lying to anyone anyway," Evan pointed out, squeezing Spike with an amused smile.

"…Yes, all right, there's that, too."

"But potions is _yours,_ " Reg complained. "If there's one area where you could have brought it off!"

Spike threw up the hand that wasn't on Evan. The other one twitched, too. Ev managed not to laugh at him. "For pity's sake, Reggie, he works projects with _Flamel!_ If there's one person I wouldn't try it with! No. By destroying it when I was annoyed about something else, I showed him it _wasn't important_. He thought it was just some frippery I was playing with using better equipment than I have at home, and he didn't even ask."

Reg's fists clenched, and he was silent for a long moment, breathing through his teeth. Finally, he said, not quite grudgingly but utterly frustrated, "Well, thanks then. But of all the luck!"

"I know, it's rotten," Severus said, joining his frustration. "I'm sorry, really I am. It's unlikely I'll another chance to do all the tests I'd prefer even if there were another sample. But, listen, I didn't have enough time with it to develop with a counter-potion, but I have some leads. And frankly, perfecting counterpotions to complex brews with unknown ingredients can take months unless one gets lucky enough to hit on the right combination right away just based on the symptoms, which in this case is beyond unlikely. Can't be done at home, not now or soon. It's one thing here, where if there's any eyes on me they're relaxed and I have ready access to all sorts of ingredients, and He considers my time more or less pre-wasted by definition, I don't need to account for it, but at home… I just don't have the equipment, Reg. Much less the stores. I'd have to go to the Manor, and you know whenever I'm there brewing Luke likes to hang about and ask questions and talk history."

"He shouldn't do that," Evan noted. "It distracts you."

"He—you— _that_ distracts me?" Severus sputtered, turning to stare at him with a disbelieving grin that was very nearly a full-sized normal-person smile. His lips actually parted. Ev could very nearly see the shadows of the bottoms of his front teeth. "I don't want to hear that from you, you incredible hypocrite."

Evan grinned back and bit his shoulder—through the waistcoat. Reggie was there, after all.

Severus shook his head, smiling, and turned back more soberly to Reg, who was trying not to laugh. "I found a few things out, anyway. Do you want me to tell you now?"

Reg sighed, and thought about it. "No," he said eventually. "Don't tell me, tell Kreacher. I don't trust my occlumency with a big secret, and… and he's more mobile anyway, in a pinch."

"If you go back there without me I will hang you from the ceiling like a first-year," Severus said levelly. "In Diagon. In the ice-cream parlor. You have no reason to go back. Don't even think about it."

"I just… it's got to be important," Reg muttered.

"Yes," Severus agreed. "So _don't muck about_. Do you think there was anything there we didn't see?"

Reg stared at him and said flatly, "I have never been so wet _in my life. In. My. Life. With dead things and fire._ "

"Poor kitten," Evan sympathized, snuggled in all cozy and dry with his head on Spike's shoulder, quite enjoying himself even though he had almost no idea what was going on. Or possibly because of it. After all, the whole point of latching onto Severus back in second year (other than because Narcissa was doing it) had been to be along for the ride.

"There was not," Severus said, in a decisive tone that suggested Reg had meant _of course not, Spike, you're quite right_. "We saw everything. Therefore any research into it that's effective will be done on this end. Further, if it's important, and I agree it is, it may be checked on from time to time. I assure you, those checks won't be announced. If there's any evidence of anyone having been there, the guard may be intensified. _Keep out of it_."

Reggie looked mutinous (it made him look twelve, Evan thought, and awfully cute) and demanded, "What did Dumbledore want with you, anyway?"

"Exactly what I wanted him to want with me," Severus replied, raising an eyebrow. "Did you think you'd been taken away from Bellatrix so I could have an occlumency study partner because he wanted me to learn it for fun?" He didn't use pronouns with quite so dramatic Obvious Capitals as some, but there was still no doubt as to whom he was referring.

"I am so proud of you," Evan sighed, undoing the stone-green cravat and a few buttons so he could nose into the sharp collarbones. Because Reggie was looking appalled and awestruck, and saying _Merlin, Spike,_ as though his question had been nearly-answered. And it hadn't. As far as Evan was aware, Spike was still playing it straight with Dumbledore, getting the occlumency lessons Evan had pushed him at. And if there wasn't anything going on Ev didn't know about yet, what Severus had said would still hold up.

"You are a ridiculous goon," Severus told his eyebrows, arm tightening around his back.

"But am I absurd?" he asked anxiously, batting his eyes up into Spike's face with a grin.

"Thoroughly," he was informed, and kissed in a most satisfactory manner. Something was clearly very wrong, because this was happening right in front of Reggie and there was no alcohol or potion on Spike's breath at all and no funny smell to the air. This wasn't quite biting him in public, but still. Evan took note, but enjoyed it anyway.

"Can't you two stop for _five minutes?_ " Reggie demanded. He was hiding dramatically in one of the also awful-avocado-green armchairs around the little coffee table.

"Theoretically," Evan mused, smoothly fighting Spike's very silly and abashed attempts to disentangle himself. He had noticed that Reg's horrors-oh-no-yuck position had turned most of his front away from them. This looked deliberate and was very interesting and he didn't think Severus had noticed it properly. "If we were given a very good reason. I mean, no one can say 'get a room,' because it's our room. Nor do we have guests. Right, Spike?"

"Reggie is not a guest," Severus parroted, dutifully and mechanically, his dark eyes taking on the pinched, glazed look imparted by one too many viciously squashed toes, "Reggie is family, do not treat Reggie like a guest, he will be terribly offended and possibly cry and it will be _all your fault_ , darling."

"I'm not going to _cry,_ " Reg huffed, trying hard to be more offended than amused.

"She still tends to think she needs to go for overkill to make him understand anything," Evan explained, giving Spike another kiss on the jaw and also a commiserating pat on his lean thigh. Then he left his hand there. Because that was where it ought to be. Mmm. "Especially anything to do with points of etiquette."

"Stop a bit, you do look as if you're going to cry, a little," Severus said, examining Reggie more carefully with his hand curled warm and dry over Evan's. "Or you let Luke talk you into trying the kelpie. So do you," he added in surprise, after examining Evan more closely because of the look Ev and Reggie had exchanged. "Did something happen?"

They looked at each other some more, and Evan turned his palm over so he was holding hands with Severus. Spike was probably going to think he meant to tell him something by that, but Evan just needed to. Because if he could ever get Spike to join Houses with him (and someday he was going to figure out what Severus's massive secret problem was, aargh), well, the House of Snape would not be involved, because there wasn't one. "There was a spot of unpleasantness," he said slowly.

"You do realize that covers everything from one of the players losing their tea while flying over the stands to genocide," Severus mentioned dryly, his back tightening under Evan's arm.

"Nothing happened to anyone we know," Evan assured him, to only marginal relaxation. His Spike was perceptive like that. "One of the local wizards came running in from the apparition point—most of the Dartmoor Aurors were assigned to the tourney for security, you know." Severus nodded impatiently. Evan shrugged, a little weakly saying, "His husband had… wasn't findable. Not a traditionally wizarding surname, as it happens."

He felt Severus go still under him, unquestionably remembering, just as Evan had, that very strange mass meeting. _Let them disappear, let them have accidents…_ "Well," Severus said slowly, "people do run off, and… things," he ended vaguely, but his lips had gone white. It was what anyone else would have said, but anyone else would have said it in a practical tone, and believed it.

"Point-me hadn't worked for him," Regulus said quietly. "Or sending an owl."

"Well, when people don't want to be found, Unplottable charms and—"

"Didn't work for the Aurors, either," Ev cut him off. "Nothing they tried had worked, last I heard."

"Did you," Severus was clearly starting to ask Regulus if he'd known anything about it, but then he abruptly stopped himself, white around the eyes now and mouth very tight. Reggie shook his head anyway, and Severus's hand over Evan's went bruising and shaky in relief. "Right," he said in a slightly unsteady tone, "lots of occlumency lessons, needs loads of work, have hit a very promising tricky bit. Tell me everything."

"The games went on after the Aurors got him private," Reg said, "but Lucius went all concerned-sponsor on them; we got it from him. Er, he was sort of smug."

Severus thudded his head in wild despair against the back of the loveseat.

"I don't think he was smug when he was in there with the Aurors," Evan hastened to assure him, squeezing. "A bit self-important, maybe. They were rolling their eyes a bit when they were leaving, but they didn't look as if they thought he was involved at all."

"Well, thank Loki for small favors," Severus said sourly. "All right, go on."

"Should we?" Reg asked slowly. "You're upset." It was another question, and the two of them locked eyes. Evan could feel a tingle of magic tightening the air between them.

"I'm concerned," Severus said evenly. "Any upset to business-as-usual, any new development, is cause for close attention. When it's designed to attract negative attention, that's a risk by its nature. You're upset, too," he noted, and the feel of the magic under Evan's skin changed, like currents that didn't show on the water's surface.

"I," Reg started, and stopped. He looked as if he wanted to look away, but couldn't. Evan noticed with interest that it wasn't the sort of staring contest where blinking meant a loss; more like cats.

"Oh, you haven't been pleased, before," Severus conceded, tilting his head a little, and his voice had clicked into the smooth, cool, detached, analytical mode that might have gotten labeled Ravenish if it hadn't sounded so very scaled. "You've acted from duty, not inclination, you've been bothered and upset. But not like this. What makes the difference?"

"I… it's just…" As though he expected Severus to start screeching at him the way his mother had at Siri when they were all at school, Regulus half looked like the words were escaping him against his will, and half as if it took all his courage to force them out. "It's just, it might be a mudblood, but that's still a wizard," he said, very pale, and hurriedly added, "I dunno, it just feels different."

The magic broke. Spike said, very tiredly, "Oh, Reggie, you…"

 _Idiot_ , Evan finished for him silently. Sometimes with Severus you knew what he was going to say, even before you knew exactly why. This time, though, Ev had more than half an idea, and it only started with the very last time Severus had made himself use that word, in a tactical success which had been a strategic catastrophe.

"I know I shouldn't—" Reg started.

"Do you know?" Severus cut him off, pulling away from Evan enough to scrub at his eyes. Ev gave him the space, but no extra. Reg had to see Evan be not-disturbed for this conversation. Being at least as much of an idiot as Reggie, Spike would also need to feel Evan's body not processing any second thoughts. "You don't believe that bilge of Narcissa's, do you?"

"…Er?"

"Regulus," Severus stressed, still sounding very tired, " _I'm_ a mudblood."

"You are _not_!" Reggie hissed, drawing himself up straight enough that he almost looked, for once in his life, like a proper Black. Evan immediately summoned a parchment pad and his pastels (from behind Spike's head, so they each smacked him on the way. Served him right for talking about Evan's bloke like that). Uncle Orion and Aunt Wally and Cissy and everyone would kill him if he let them miss this and they ever found out. Reg spared a moment to glance at Ev in annoyance, but didn't back down. "What did I tell you? You shut up about our Spike!"

"Everyone really needs to get over the idea that's an insult," Severus said dryly while Evan grinned in endorsement at Reg, like knives. "Earth and water together: that's what things grow in, you do realize. I'm sure you took Herbology."

Evan's hand actually paused, which it had not done when one of his clients had confided exactly why Minister Brookstanton had resigned in Millicent Bagnold's favor, and what it had to do with house elves. "Oh, no, is _that_ what you meant?" he demanded. Although he couldn't quite pin down why he was appalled more than surprised, he was sure he was. " _That's_ the elemental theory you talked about in Runes, that Evans forgot? She was supposed to think it was all right you called her—because—oh, _Spike…"_

"It was meant to be something approaching code, yes, but if we might revisit the topic," Severus said impatiently. Then he paused, and looked at Evan more closely. "When on earth did I mention that to you?" he asked, a little bewildered.

Evan didn't say _After our Defense OWL,_ or even _On the worst night in the world,_ and he wouldn't have even if Reg hadn't been present. He never, never brought that day up with Severus if he could help it. Or at all. It had had its points, but the way Severus had looked after Potter and Sirius had finished with him, and then after _Evans_ had finished with him…

He felt it was best to remember that as seldom as possible. He'd caught himself winding up for a spot of Blackish insanity that day, and it wasn't like Bella's, or Siri's, or like when he just lost his temper. No wands would have been involved. It had been Rosier-cold enough to terrify him, when he thought back on it later. He had been very nearly ready to start a civil war, if that was what it took to see Potter properly punished and disempowered. He'd never told anyone, but he had a feeling Severus suspected it was in him anyway.

So he said, "You weren't really awake," which was true. And did not twine in to kiss Spike again, because Spike was trying to make a point and he knew he would have been suspiciously and clingingly protective about it.

"…Right," Severus said, looking at him suspiciously.

Evan allowed the fond smile out. It wanted to come, because that was such a Severus expression. He allowed it because he knew it would make Severus roll his eyes, understand he wasn't getting anything else for the moment, and pass him over again. Which it did. And they all said his Spike was uncooperative.

"Revisit," Severus repeated, still looking at him suspiciously (because cooperative, sometimes, but graceful only when he couldn't avoid it), "the topic."

"Let's not," Reggie suggested, trying to save everyone, "and say we didn't."

"No, let's," Severus said with horrible false cheer, "and then I don't give a damn what you say. Call it halfblood, mudblood, halfbreed, spade or soil-turning implement, Reg: my father is mundane, muggle, unmagical, common as muck, whatever you please to call it. It is a fact, let us deal with it. Because I really can't handle you squirming at me for being uncomfortable with muggleborns meeting misfortune because they're not _technically_ muggles, I just can't even," he turned both his palms up and waved them as though grasping for words. "I don't even know how to conceptualize that, frankly."

Reg looked as though he didn't know how to think about _that._ "But Spike," he protested, "your father—I'm sorry, I wouldn't want you talking about my mother, but your father's a complete pig, you know he is, he's _rotten_ to you. He's, he's _in the dictionary_ why we need to take the world away from them, he's got his picture under Muggles Muck Everything Up And Can't Handle Responsibility And If They Get Wizards In Their Power Watch Out."

Severus had his considering-your-argument-point-by-point face on. Evan quickly flipped to a new page. He loved that face, and putting it up against Reggie's earnest one, yes, he was going to have to convert this to paint later. Just a still, of course, or… oh, no! He had packed his camera, ha!

Spike was glaring at him before the flash had died away. He grinned triumphantly and wand-zipped it out of sight and blasting range, ready to swoop back if they did anything else irresistibly enthralling.

Shaking his head, Severus turned back to Reggie and said, "All true. Except for the barnyard animal part, because _as well as_ all of that, _and_ the willingness to wallow in drink and useless wounded-bear self-pity, he's the one who gave me books, and the dissatisfaction that leads to ambition and creation. The Princes are…" his eyes canted up and right, searching for something again, and his mouth twisted. "Are very _Gryff,_ as a rule. Sometimes Ravenclaw, but I'm given to understand they wouldn't, as a family, know imagination if it jumped up and down on them. Mam's sharp, but thinking outside the turtle does not happen. You put her in a box and give her a ladder and she'll try to use it as a battering ram." His lip curled. "If she doesn't just decide _oh, look! I'm in a box. Fancy. I must've meant to be here. Best make the best of it_."

"Ohhh," Reggie sighed, looking relieved. Evan knew what that was about; Reg had been struggling for years not to be too obviously repelled by his friend's mum the muggle-lover, and now he had a way to think about her that gave him a chance to be sympathetic. Or, at least, pitying. "Is that what happened?"

"I think so, more or less," Severus said, sounding more judicious than vague. It didn't look to Evan as if he knew what 'that' meant to Regulus any more than Ev did. Evidently he was willing to go with it if it made Reggie feel better, as long as he didn't have to say _yes, definitely._

"But, " Reg said, "so what? I mean, all right, so your mum's Gryffish, well, she _was_ one, wasn't she?" Severus inclined his head. "So, so what?"

"Really missing the point, kitten," Severus said gently. "Look, maybe there's something wrong with me as a Slytherin—"

"There is," they chorused immediately, kneejerk.

Spike scowled at them. Evan, at least, grinned, although Reggie was too unsettled for it. " _But_ ," he went on, very nearly as though they hadn't spoken, "there's a limit to how much I can let you lie to yourself about something this big, Reg."

Reg didn't say anything, just gave him a furrow-browed I-don't-understand face.

Severus sighed. "Me da," he said, not oblivious to but ruthless about the way the changed way of speaking about his father made Regulus start in discomfort, "is a fairly useless excuse for a human being, but Reg, he _is_ one, he's not a cardboard cut-out brute any more than yours is a brainless, heartless shadow."

"He very nearly is, when he's been drinking," Reg admitted on a sigh.

" _Precisely_ ," Severus said feelingly, wincing. He caught up Reg's eyes again. "Then and only then. Reggie, you have to admit what you're doing or it'll suddenly burst on you at the worst time. Because you _do_ know, really. I know you do, or you wouldn't be upset. That's your mind trying to tell you. You have to process it, or you won't be able to manage, it'll explode on you. Call them fools, call them dangerous, call them enemies, call them a hated threat we must harden ourselves to contain. _Don't_ call them less than human. It's a lie, and you know it is, and the knowing that you aren't listening to will suddenly get sick of you and shout in your ear and trip you up. Right when you can't afford it."

Regulus had gone white, and Evan looked between them. Severus wasn't quite what Evan would have called white on him, despite his usual pallor, but he had his _sod everything, I'm doing this_ look.

He said to Reg, "Excuse us a moment. Stay put," and dragged Severus into the en suite, closed the door. Raised his eyebrows.

Severus raised his eyebrows back, looking very tired and very stubborn but not actually as if he was sure he knew what he was doing.

"Are you going to tell me what happened today?" Evan asked instead, therefore.

"Later."

Evan looked at him some more, gauging.

"I don't mind if he wants to be obliviated," Severus lied and went on, meaning it very much, "but I'd rather do something more complicated. Only he gets a bit paranoid about the new memory spells, he'd probably rather you chaperoned. But you might not want to stay."

"Don't be _stupid,_ " Evan ordered, and hauled him close. Severus curled in and clung, his long, strong fingers twisting in bruisingly, bony nose mashing into Evan's neck and those poky ribs feeling, by contrast, strikingly vulnerable in his arms.

After a moment, Severus said into him, "Narcissa was there, and she… based on what she did, I made some decisions for all of us. It was a crisis point, and I thought if she, then you'd…"

"Well, I didn't really think you were stupid," Ev assured his hair, and got a slightly watery chuckle and an even tighter cling. Evan kissed his ear, and asked, "Will you tell me, when he's gone? Under your tablet spell, maybe, and then I'll decide whether to remember?"

Severus nodded, a little frantically, which was a mistake. Evan couldn't _not,_ when he was shaken and needy and open and had _trusted Evan to follow his lead when Evan wasn't even there_.

Sadly/Fortunately-for-Severus, there were quite a lot of layers of quite tight cloth and even more buttons involved, and Reggie not only knew Evan but had been right there at school with them before Ev had discovered how discriminating his taste was, when you got right down to it. So things hadn't progressed all _that_ far before Reg was kicking the door, sounding nearly recovered and very irritable, and complaining, "You two had better be _fighting_ in there."

"DEFINITELY FIGHTING YES," Severus agreed gratefully, slapping Evan's hands away and fixing his clothes. Or trying to.

"You could get a Prince Egbert," Evan removed his teeth to suggest sunnily, conspicuously failing to help. Helping, was in his opinion, against his interests.

"I will not dignify that with a response," Spike hissed viciously, and then reconsidered. "No, I will not dignify that with a _correction,_ " he corrected himself, and kicked Evan in the shin, just like Narcissa only about a twentieth as hard.

"Ow," said Evan magnanimously, so as to save him face or play the game, whichever was appropriate, so they were laughing when they came out. Not out loud, of course, that wasn't necessary. Severus's mum may have been a Gryff, but they weren't.

"And now you're all smug," Reg complained, cringing.

"He kicked me," Evan explained, nobly wounded.

"You were _egregious,_ " retorted Severus.

"Yes, I suppose so," Ev conceded. If anyone else had made even a joking suggestion about even the most superficial alterations to Spike's bits, he would have been obliged to Step In.

"Wait," asked a startled Reggie, "you actually _were_ fighting?"

They looked at each other, and turned identical inscrutable faces on him.

He scowled, and slumped in his chair, and grumped, "I hate everybody."

"Not bad," Severus said brightly.

"No, Reggie," Ev helped, "you need to growl more. And he doesn't slump, he sort of arches his back very tight with his shoulders sharply down at a hood-angle, _very_ cobra, and crosses his arms high, as if otherwise his lungs might fall out, then just lowers down menacingly with his neck like a vulture and glares through his eyebrows. It looks a bit like slumping, but it's not, it's only his head down. Not even his whole head, really, you sort of," he waved his fingers, "only do it from the eyebrows. The head goes back, not down, just his chin pulls in a bit and the top of the head stays in place. A swivel from the eyebrows, that's the ticket. Only make sure you don't overdo that bit, it's not as dramatic an angle as he makes it look. The hair helps."

Regulus looked at him as if he was odd and dangerous. Spike asked, in a strained voice that was trying to play dense and plaintive instead of on-the-verge-of-laughter, "But what's my motivation?"

Evan could have said, _Usually, not wanting to admit someone's right,_ or _Wishing the world was different._ Judging this would not be politic and not understanding what Spike was going for, he just kissed him, lightly and warmly. This got him settled comfortably in the loveseat again with Spike's arm snug around his waist, and had therefore been the right move.

" _Spike,_ " Reg started, annoyed and insistent and worried.

"It's all right," Evan cut him off. "The Dark Lord knows Spike's going to have a different point of view on this. He doesn't mind."

"He really doesn't," Severus agreed, smiling oddly. "He understands where I'm coming from better than you might think."

"An unorthodox point of view, of course," Evan put in, hastily without sounding hasty, before Severus could even think about letting slip potentially lethal facts like the Dark Lord Voldemort knowing about and even preferring Severus's joined-up muggle 'cursive' writing style that took special training to read, let alone write. "But really, Reg, don't worry about it. If Bella finds out and goes telling tales, she'll just get a pat on the head, or maybe even an earful about underestimating the enemy."

"So I should think," Severus said with emphatic disgust, though he was probably wrong and Evan was probably exaggerating. Reg relaxed at this evidence their Spike wasn't showing a soft side, and that was the important thing.

"It's Binns' fault, really," Spike went on reflectively. "The witch-burnings were because of religion. A highly-fraught confluence of thought, imagination, opinion, prejudice, and feeling. Animals don't have all those, they just want food and fruition."

"Mmmfruition," Evan purred into his neck.

Spike smacked his wrist and went on talking to Reggie, but his arm around Evan didn't go away, so clearly he was giggling and/or planning snogging-back in there somewhere. "He ought to teach more than goblins wars and names-and-dates. It's ridiculous we think of goblins like foreigners and muggles like plague fleas. They're both sentient alien-neighbors with the potential to be clever and dangerous, among other things. When we don't acknowledge it, we get nastily surprised at bad times to be surprised. We can learn that much from Binns, at least—provided we're paying attention," he finished sourly.

"Maybe," Reg smiled, "if you couldn't get the DADA job, you should ask Dumbledore if you can teach History, Spike."

Spike laughed, lightening a little. "Oh, I'll leave that to Luke, I think," he waved a hand. "He's the one who hasn't any other interests but money."

"Lucius," Evan mused dreamily, "in front of a classroom of ten ferociously interested Ravenclaws in their OWL year."

"Fixating on his hair," Reg snickered. "And the girls all," he made a descriptive gesture, "blossoming, and Cissy's picture on his desk, ready to report back to her."

"Or twelve Gryffindor first years," Spike suggested sadistically, "clamoring for battle reenactments."

"He could play all the damsels," Evan proposed, and they all sighed in rapturous contemplation.

"He's not all _that_ girly-looking," Spike eventually ruined it, either because he was constitutionally impelled to be factually correct or because he habitually wore his hair down himself and didn't like thinking of himself as a hypocrite.

Reg threatened him with a pillow.

"He is, in fact," Evan yawned cozily, secure in having the least willowy bone structure in the room, and happily abused Lucius until Reg started getting hungry.

It was perfectly fair, because he was quite sure he got made fun of himself, though probably at briefer length, whenever it occurred to his relatives that he existed. Which wouldn't have been nearly so often. Lucius, like Severus, made it rather difficult to forget he existed, and he made himself much more visible.

Eventually, though, Reg did get hungry, and forgot where they were far enough to ask hopefully, "Any new recipes, Spike?"

Severus rolled his eyes. "I don't have a kitchen here, Reggie, the elves would have fits. Ring the bell if you're hungry. I do have a new spell, though," he added, once the elf assigned to their room (who frankly got on Evan's nerves. Elves were supposed to look judgmentally at you up their noses for making your bed wrong, not scamper in to do it before you had the chance and then beam at you anxiously for approval) had gone, leaving behind a tea-tray that made Evan regret he hadn't joined in the Quidditch and worked up a worthy appetite.

"We can go flying tonight," Severus offered, seeing him goggle at Mt. Carbohydrate. "I'm sure they'd let you on the pitch, since you're immortalizing it. Reggie can join us if he's not all flown out."

Reg gave them both an appalled look, and started to chew his bite of pastry hastily, trying to swallow it and say yes, thanks, he was, before this could be decided for him.

"Or," Spike said innocently, tilting his head as if in thought, "I could send you around with a tub of grenade balm—"

"It _isn't called that,_ " Evan insisted. No one was offering to use it on him, so he had nothing to lose.

"Yes, it is. —Send you around to find that lunatic classmate of yours, Reg. He was skulking around the conference earlier this week pretending to be competent. I sent him off with a flea in his ear, but I'm sure he'll have weaseled his way back in by now, and be very happy, if you're all achy—well, that is, he always tells _me_ he has a boyfriend even though I'm sure I give him no excuse to think I care, but—"

"A NEW SPELL, YOU SAID?" Reggie asked desperately, and Evan let himself sprawl over the back of the loveseat, snickering.

Managing to look moderately exasperated with Reg rather than smug at the conversation going where he wanted it to, Severus gave a put-up on sigh and said, "Yes, I said that."

"GOSH THAT SOUNDS FASCINATING LET'S SEE THEN."

Severus gave Regulus one of his patented, utterly disgusted is-it-worth-arguing-with-Blacks-SIGH-no-probably-not looks (Ev only applauded in his head), shook his head a little, and drawled sarcastically, "So it has been written, so it shall be done." He drew out his wand lazily, and cast, " _Tabula adamantium,_ " on Regulus.

"It didn't do anything," Reg said after a moment.

" _Ah la déjà vu,"_ Evan murmured nostalgically.

"It's not dramatic," Severus said. "Also, it's only a first step. It prepares the way."

"Er?" Evan asked, tilting an eyebrow at him.

"In this case, it prepares the way," Severus amended. "That part I had perfected months ago, it's the next bit that's new."

"Am I a guinea pig?" Reggie asked suspiciously, although really he looked more resigned than anything else.

"I did it last time," Evan informed him, nobly angelic.

"Don't be stupid," Severus told them both with a scowl. He was watching Reg with veiled interest, though, as though Reg wasn't behaving quite as expected. "I work at St. Mungo's. I have access to lab animals, testing dummies, and extremely resilient sentients whose rights the Ministry doesn't acknowledge and who are universally in dire need of under-the-table cash. If I wanted to do illicit human experimentation, I would have no need to use friends with touchy and powerful families for spell-testing. Leave the paranoia to me, you're bad at it."

Reggie gaped. " _Bad at_ … what does that even mean?!"

Evan looked at Severus speculatively. "That we're worrying about the wrong thing, I think. Enlighten us, then, O Swami of Stress."

"No," Spike replied smugly, and hauled him in for a quick kiss instead.

Evan gave him puppy eyes, but he just smirked more. "See, this is what we need Narcissa for," he told Reggie dolefully.

"She's probably asleep already," the evil prat's dark voice chirped brightly. "But I'm sure Reg could find Lock—"

"Weren't you going to show us something that's _something_?" Reg demanded.

"Oh, I suppose," Severus said, "although one does get tired of explaining it afresh every time." He looked at Reggie speculatively, one of his _I don't have to spoon-feed you answers, surely_ looks.

"Wait," Reg said slowly. "Tabula… tabula rasa is a blank slate, so an adamant tablet… what, can't be erased? Or can't be written on?" He looked alarmed. "I'm not going to remember this?"

"Actually," Severus said, looking pleased, "I find that one does retain important information learned under the Adamant Slate, unless particular force is used in both casting and closing the spell. —I suppose it has to be tablet. Slate is slate, not adamant…"

Evan cleared his throat gently.

"However," Severus smoothly continued, only looking a little caught-out and disgruntled around the nose area, "the information comes to one later as impressions, as intuition, not as memory. I did have to explain a great deal about the spell to you when you were under it before, much more than this time, and you were much more upset about the guinea pig idea."

Evan and Regulus looked at each other. Finally dubious and rather faint, Reg asked, " _Evan_ was egregious?"

"You might consider not giving people heart attacks when I'm not around to translate and do cleanup, salad fork of my swimming shorts," Evan agreed, frowning. Reggie winced at that image, and Severus scowled. "And on the subject of swimming shorts," he added, drawing a firm conclusion on scanty evidence because he had actually met Severus, "clearly you cannot be trusted at the shore without me, jellyfish or no jellyfish. This is henceforth disallowed."

"…Oh," Reg said thoughtfully, while Severus visibly debated with himself over whether to smirk some more or attempt to look apologetic. "Then. I suppose that makes sense."

"It does," Severus agreed, settling on a philosophical shrug for Evan, "and so does this. If you'd told me yes, you do trust your occlumency for this sort of information, Reg, well. As you don't, I'm giving you information you need but putting it where it can't be touched."

 _'If you had, well then,' my finely-toned fundament,_ Evan thought, while an anxious and determined Regulus said, "Oh," again, caught between pride and cynicism and amusement and being very, very, worried.

The thing was: Evan personally wouldn't have trusted Reggie's occlumency to keep a secret about a birthday party or where the cheese was hidden, never mind the biscuits. Reggie's occlumency, however advanced, was attached to Reggie's _face_. And Ev wasn't Spike.

"But I'm not going to remember you telling me _that!_ " Reg protested.

"Exactly," Spike agreed, looking sufficiently pleased with himself that it was all Evan could do not to bend him over the arm of the love-seat.

The idea had been to make Severus instinctively associate showing nonaggressive confidence with being snogged. Severus wasn't particularly susceptible to that sort of manipulation. It took a lot of work to even make a dent. Really-truly a lot.

Narcissa had laughed at Evan for an uncalled-for length of time when he'd sulked at her about the backfire.

"—Don't say 'oh,' again, Reg, will you?" Severus added, looking lightly pained, just as Reggie was opening his mouth. He shut it with a scowling snap. "Now. Ev, you're going to help; come away over here."

Raising an eyebrow, Evan followed him back to the en suite. "Well, if we're picking up where we left off, that certainly helps me," he teased Reg as they went, "but I'm not sure where it leaves Reggie."

"Homicidal?" Reg called helpfully.

"You're both hilarious," Severus deadpanned, this time not closing the door as they went in. He sat on the lip of the bath, pulling a notebook out of one of his pockets. They were good work; Evan wasn't sure if Severus had let the tailor charm them for him or had done it himself. In most matters he would have been sure, but there were only so many fights even Severus was happy to have at once, especially over clothes, and Narcissa's tailor got hysterical about letting amateurs work on his craftsmanship.

So did Evan's, but only if they interfered with his lines. Severus and Evan's tailor had looked each other over (Spike had peered around the shop, Twillfit at Spike's sleeves and potions holsters), shaken hands, told Evan _no_ in the same very firm tone of voice, and then talked fabric-related potions for half an hour while Evan mourned the death of his dream of Spike in a decent outfit one might wish to paint him or take him to the theatre to mock the actors in.

Writing briefly now, Severus folded the paper and handed it over. "You get plausible deniability for your birthday, do you like it?" he asked, still dryly.

"You're always so thoughtful," Evan cooed, pecking his cheek like an auntie before remarking, "That is, you would be if you weren't nearly three months late. Doghouse for you, my man."

"For Lammas?" Spike tried again, half his mouth pulling up crookedly in a Spike-grin.

"You only give _bread or fruit-baskets_ on Lammas, you nutter," Evan reminded him, pretending exasperation before pulling him up to kiss him for real.

"You always bring wine."

"Mmm, it's fruit in a container, falls under fruit-baskets…"

"Get off me, you distractible loon, I—mmn—I have to finish with Reggie."

"He's not going to remember, Spike."

"Which is why I have to make the window of time he's losing as small as possible."

"You have that time-sense distorting spell…"

" _Evan_."

Evan sighed, removed his hands and let Severus right his shirt and waistcoat. Again. The things he put up with. "You're telling me whatever I want to know when he's gone _and_ I get to put whatever I want to on you later," he said mutinously, since Severus had already agreed to the first bit and he had a good argument for the second.

Spike opened his mouth, paused, looked at him dubiously.

"It's not our bed," he pointed out. "There are elves to do a deep-cleaning of anything normal charms can't get, and we're allowed to obliviate them."

Severus looked disturbed. "We're not allowed to transfigure the furniture, but we're allowed to obliviate the elves?"

"Well, we'd have to compensate the estate if we did it badly," he said. "Property integrity and guest privacy, you know. They're values."

"…Nothing I object to intrinsically," Severus paranoided at him like a professionally-suspicious mule.

"Is it possible you have a stranger mind than I do?" Evan asked, only his face laughing.

"Proven, I should say. Nonetheless!" Spike gave him narrow-squinty eyes, but he was playing now.

"Fine, fine, only the dark chocolate," Evan laughed, out loud now, and swooped in to nip the tongue Spike stuck out at him.

"I CAN HEAR YOU," Reggie howled despondently.

"It's code?" Evan tried, not very hard. Regulus growled, and with an I'll-show- _you_ air got up to steal the loveseat. All of it. Feet on the arm and everything. Well, it wasn't Evan's sofa, and they all had their boots off already.

"It's Evan thinking he's a wag, is what it is," Severus said briskly. More quietly, "Evan, I'll ask you to come out and read what I've written out loud in a moment. Sound decided, sure of yourself: you've come to the only possible conclusion."

"May I ask why?"

"Your voice sounds leagues more like Reg's than mine does."

"…All… right…?"

"It's barely possible it might be all right, though I doubt it. We'll take the chance. When I give the nod. Don't do anything for the moment."

"I'll just sit here and think about puddings," Evan said agreeably. "Mmm, elderflower whipped cream…" Spike wouldn't actually object to that, even if he didn't see the point… or better yet, (seedless) jam and clotted cream, like a scone… and then Severus would never be able to have tea again, which would serve him right and be _delicious_ in so very, very many ways… although, no, if he never actually had tea-the-beverage again, he might decide to hog all the coffee. And not just out of spite, either.

"Would you prefer to meditate on them vocally or ever have one again someday?" Severus asked sweetly.

"Shutting up," Evan promptly conceded.

Severus managed not to say _you astonish me_ out loud, though Ev could hear him thinking it—and not just because Reg snickered, presumably at his expression. "Good, so am I. _Muffliato_."

"Not _quite_ the same thing," Evan said anyway, because it was what Severus would have said and because they could hear him even if he couldn't hear them. He lounged in the doorway, watching Severus start off casually peremptory and turn increasingly and warmly hypnotic, and Regulus correspondingly go from mildly suspicious (in a _Spike is going to feed me basil-and-chili-flavored biscuits and just tell me 'careful, they're hot,' I can tell_ ,sort of way) to comfortably dazed.

Then Severus's eyes cooled off, although not all the way to chilly. Sad, more like. He was clearly painting a very unpleasant word-picture, because Reggie's stupor went to a glazed, shivery, overwhelmed, wide-eyed place, and his neck started to twitch. Evan frowned, but Severus caught it and looked up to shake his head at him warningly. He said a few more things to Regulus, who deeply disturbed Evan by starting to cry.

Not the tempests one would have expected of Sirius or Bella. He just… leaked. His face was blank. And wet.

Evan took a picture while Severus wasn't watching. Hopefully he'd be able to study the expression in a pensieve, but he was _going_ to do something with it, in oils, even if for some reason he didn't get to remember seeing it live.

Severus sat down next to Reg with a somber expression, folded him up, and kept talking. Finally, Regulus nodded, or at least, his head dipped as though someone had cast a mass-increasing spell on it. But there was a distinct pause to the motion before he let it fall all the way to Severus's shoulder and hid his eyes. Severus shook his head, and although Evan wasn't much of a lip-reader he could tell that he'd said, "No, look up," because Reggie very reluctantly did.

Taking a long breath, Severus dug something out of another pocket and put it down next to them, took his wand in his hand, and beckoned Evan over, inside the buzz-shield of the muffling spell. He said, "Now close your eyes, and when Evan speaks, open them."

Reg nodded dully, and closed his eyes. Severus hovered the thing he'd put down right in front of them, and then pointed his wand at Regulus. He cast, " _Tabula obculto_ ," and nodded at Evan.

Ev opened his folded-up piece of paper and saw that Spike had used his terrible, cramped, spidery calligraphy for this, evidently not wanting any mistakes and feeling it was more likely to be understood than his probably-more-legible-when-you-understood-it joined-up writing. He read, "I can't do this anymore. I won't do this anymore."

Regulus opened his eyes, focused on the photo-sized thing in front of him, and drew in a hissing breath.

"It's all right," Severus said, low and insistent and determined. "We'll have your back. We _will._ You can safely trust us, my word on it. _Cludo incantatum. Reducto. Tergeo. Finite incantatum._ " The photo, whatever it had been, reduced to vanished ashes and the muffliato dropped, he closed the adamant tablet as well as the obscuring one with a second, " _Cludo incantatum. Niobe prismatos,_ " he finished, instantly switching to a quite different tone, light and playful.

Reggie's eyes began to stream with tears that, once they were an inch or so down from his eyes, separated into tiny crystal droplets, blazing with light. "There," Severus said smugly, very clearly in Spike mode now, although it was a total LIE and Evan wasn't sure whether he was more disturbed or compelled. "Now the next time Bellatrix needs taking down a peg, you can let her see she's not the only one who's ever made you cry."

"Spike, you are _suicidal,_ " Reggie laughed, trying to catch the bright little stones in a handkerchief while they went on chiming down off his face. "Turn it off."

"I don't know," Spike mused, idly rubbing his cheekbone up and down his wand (a good argument for 'compelled,' Evan felt). "Do you think he's got enough for a necklace or some such frippery, Ev? His mother still doesn't like me at all _._ "

"Never happen, Spike, give up," Ev advised sympathetically.

"Oh, I have, but the continuing effort at least wins me a grudging lack of loud contempt."

"That is impressive," he allowed, and Reg nodded very hard, so that some of the crystals were flung off his face and disappeared into corners of the horrible green-brown carpet, "Go a few more minutes and you could end up with a girdle. Possibly a somewhat more restrained bodice."

"Spiiiike," Reggie whined, laughing through his tears.

"Oh, all right," Spike sighed, looking put-upon, and finished the spell with a lazy wave of his wand. With another, he gathered the crystals Reggie had missed to join the rest in his handkerchief.

"Ugh," Reg commented, scrubbing at his eyes when he had everything tucked away. "That feels just as raw as really crying."

"They did start off in your eyes as real tears," Severus said practically, and poured him some more tea. "Better hydrate."

"I'm fine," Reg said automatically, because he'd been caught crying.

Spike rolled his eyes. "Take the damned tea."

"Take it," Evan agreed, smiling fondly down at them, "and take it away to the armchair. You're in my seat, rabbit."

"Oh—er, right," Reg agreed, flushing, and moved himself. "That was a bit sparkly for you, wasn't it, Spike?"

"I cannot tell a lie," Severus began nobly.

"So true," they chorused, smirking.

He shot them each the stink-eye, and then sailed on as though uninterrupted. "It wasn't _entirely_ mine. The last time I was up at the castle working on Professor Dumbledore, I ran into Professor Flitwick and we ended up in a bit of a charmsmithing jam." His eyes crinkled, although Evan caught a hint of sour, bitter humor in his voice. "I've spent worse afternoons."

Before Regulus could think to ask anything inconvenient, Evan rearranged their limbs in a way designed to fluster the poor boy (amazingly, he was sure Spike _still_ hadn't noticed, which was just as well) and asked, "Come up with anything else?"

"As a matter of fact," Spike began, and Reggie settled snugly into the armchair with his tea and biscuits to be entertained. If anyone noticed him nursing the tea or hugging one of the dreadful cushions (they had itchy lace edging, as if being avocado-green wasn't bad enough) a little, no one mentioned it.

They didn't do any of the things Evan had been thinking of, later. Severus told Evan what he had done, once Reg had gone, and then told him louder, and then again louder still. As if, because Ev wasn't cursing or hitting him yet, he hadn't been heard.

In the end, Evan had to let Severus bellow himself hoarse on the subjects of inattentiveness and stupidity and Hamlin rats who saunter blindly over cliffs like Hufflepuff lemmings. Also to watch him break quite a lot of the hall's incredibly ugly crockery (ducking only some of it; Severus was getting better about remembering to aim to miss) before he had exhausted himself enough to be tripped onto the bed and pinned.

"Belt up, Sonorous Foghorn," Ev advised the back of his head mildly, sitting on his back and holding his wrists together.

Sometimes it was just the only way, if you didn't feel like getting kneed or bitten, although the one time he'd tried to _tie_ Spike's hands together, just to give himself some breathing room, he'd had to repaint the bedroom and replace most of the furniture. Also his eyebrows.

Where Evan had expected Spike to insist on awful replacements so he could pay for them himself, what he had actually done was pick out furniture nice enough that Narcissa _and_ _Evan's mum_ approved of it, and very loudly tell the entire store that the bill would be sent to Evan, because Evan had broken everything.

In a moment of insanity, Evan had tried (privately) to remind him of the facts with regard to who had done the actual destroying of the apartment. He had been treated to a very hissy half-hour-long and not-at-all-veiled lecture on chemical catalysts, followed by three days of empty flat: Spike had gone to stay with Narcissa until he and Evan were both nearly hallucinating from insomnia and she'd had enough.

Or possibly until Spike was exhausted enough to forget that he'd decided Evan was Not A Trusted Presence and wanted him back badly enough that even he had to admit he was no longer punishing Evan more than himself. It was hard to tell. One thing you could say about Spike, though: he knew how to teach a practical lesson so it stuck, even if you didn't understand the theory behind it.

So despite the at-least-three-quarters-hearted jerking of wiry, really quite strong cauldron-trained arms, Evan didn't reach for his wand, or for any of the things Spike kept around for him. He just hung on. "The Thames in a pea-souper is a shite river for a pleasure cruise," he went on in his most placid, implacable voice, "and sometimes you'll have to be the one to do the steering. Live with it. I can."

Severus made a noise into the pillow that unquestionably meant "But!" In practice it sounded like, "Vhhh."

"Nope."

"HHHVV-vvhhh!"

"That's me, well spotted."

Severus growled.

"Give it up, Diced Flobberworms," Evan advised sympathetically, stroking his hair with the hand that wasn't holding his bony wrists. "I've got you. Had you noticed?"

Severus growled again, this time in a distinctly more sarcastic tone.

"I note," Evan spread out over him, making himself comfortable, "that while you appear distinctly narked off," he grinned at the tiny spasm under him that meant his swerve away from a sedately pureblooded vocabulary had gotten through the flailing and shriekery and Severus had needed, just for a moment, to work at not laughing, "you do not, despite having been named at birth Strungout Overly Suspicious Paranoid-Stressball—"

He took the garbled indignation that issued from the pillow to be an accusation of either gross exaggeration or not having made that up off the top of his head. Which latter would have been slightly unfair, on the evidence, but accurate. Prefects' meetings had been boring beyond belief, and Ben Goldstein had gone through an acrostics phase in sixth year. Ben's diversions would never have passed for diverting anywhere else but in History of Magic lectures, but squibs couldn't be choosers.

As the noise was in fact incomprehensible, however, he felt well within his rights to ignore it, and went on. "Despite, I say, being thus aptly named and initialed," he ignored the grraarrgh sound, too, "you do not actually appear to be _worried_ about being sat on by someone with two inches and four stone on you."

"Sssgz," Severus forced snidely through the pillow.

"I'm sure it feels like six when I'm leaning on your hands," he allowed magnanimously, instead of pointing out that he got plenty of exercise, thank you, or that Spike did all the cooking and eighty percent of the meal planning, or that Spike's resemblance to a deplumed quill the wind might blow away at any time was no reflection on Evan and was in fact occasionally quite worrying.

"Nonetheless, I'm noting a distinct lack of panic here, Spike. Very odd. You can't get anywhere near your wand and yet nothing in the room appears to be broken—well, except the things you threw at the wall, but they were hideous, no loss there—or going any funny temperatures. And the whole school's seen you when you want to fight, so, let's be honest, I do know what I'm not-seeing here."

Severus forced his neck to turn enough to slide Evan an irritated _will you stop talking utter rot and consider coming to a point sometime this millennium the tea is getting cold_ sort of look out of his one visible eye.

Evan shook his head, and thumbed down his favorite knife, the one Spike called 'my cheekbone' and hid under his hair far too often. "And here I thought you weren't being stupid, before," he sighed. "Blackthorn, I'm not going to panic when I'm in your hands, either."

Severus went slowly all stiff and hunched. Evan eased off a little without letting him up, and rubbed slowly up and down his back. Eventually, he demanded, in a voice that was nearly at teenaged-Regulus levels of sulky, "Are you ever going to stop calling me completely ridiculous names?"

"Never," Evan promised, and lay down on him all the way to kiss the join of his neck. Breathed in the spicy, heathery oak and juniper of his soap, because although he didn't use the potion soap once he was done brewing, he used the same herbs in his evening bar. After all, Ev could put his foot down and express opinions, too—and _he_ could do it without massive property damage.

Once he'd tried something pine-scented Wilkes had given him, having read somewhere that males of his species who weren't him liked novelty and variety. Evan had made sure neither of them ever tried _that_ again, although he suspected Severus had secretly enjoyed the novelty of someone else telling him he was an idiot who shouldn't muck about in the fields of other people's expertise. "Do you want me to let you up?"

He probably wouldn't have seen it if he'd been looking, but he eventually felt Severus shake his head minutely against his nose.

"Good," he confessed, banishing the blanket to the air above them with a tap of his wand and letting it fall. "I didn't really want to. …Spike?"

The warm, hollowed-out, exhausted silence took on a listening quality.

"What made you think of crying crystals?"

"It's an old story," Severus muttered. "Pearls and diamonds, diamonds and toads. A Beedle-the-bard sort of story. One of the ones with at least two sisters and a mother who should have had them both taken away. It's usually when the girl talks, not tears, roses and jewels or pearls falling from her mouth. But I had to explain why he was crying."

"Were they really diamonds?"

"I don't think so. They weren't meant to be. Their own selves, I expect. Might be able to brew something interesting... there's all sorts of folklore about tears that heal, tears that are stones. They used to think sea glass was mermaid tears."

"Tell me," Evan urged, drawing him into a tight spoon so they were nearly on their sides but Severus was still mostly under him. Usually Severus wanted to curl up on him, which Evan occasionally found a little insulting because he knew exactly what Spike was thinking. He was perfectly capable of defending himself, thanks, and did not _want_ that slender shield between him and any theoretical attackers who made it past their defenses and wards.

But he was only occasionally insulted, when he was already in a bad mood, because he thought he felt within a Quidditch-pitch length of the same way. It didn't bother him to let Spike be the shelter more often; that just made it better when it was his turn (a very basic Slytherin calculation, second-year at most. He didn't know whether Spike had made it, or, if so, whether he didn't care or cared very much). He'd never forget the way his porcupine had gone rigid and then dissolved into a puddle the first time Ev had blanketed him, as if he'd never felt secure before in his life. It had made Evan feel like a dragon on gold. Still did. Every time.

"I could summon the book."

"No, tell me the stories," he insisted, eyes closed, feeling the pulse under his hand, against his chest, the thrum of that deep voice seeping into his blood like water into roots, as Severus turned his mind as far away from politics as they were from the moon.

In the morning, Evan aimlessly bumped into Dumbledore in the convention before he'd had half as much coffee as he really wanted, and blinked up at him in surprise. He smiled vaguely, exchanged a few polite words of conversation, passed on good wishes for Pomfrey and his favorite professors (and also to the Tartan, whose actual name he didn't try particularly hard to remember, it being a gulpy tongue-twister in any case), and left the bill for the teacups stuck to the lining of the old man's sleeve.

Not that Spike hadn't already repaired the teacups well enough that the Hall had retracted it. But Evan had made him wait until there'd been a bill to retract, because there were points that needed to be made.

Spike had deemed this a brilliant idea which served Dumbledore right for, as he viciously and rather vaguely put it, "Life, the universe, and everything." (Which he did say sometimes, as though it meant something, but when asked to explain once he'd go as oh-dear-Salazar-where-do-I-start wall-eyed as if he was being asked to teach a first-year to make amortentia.)

In the end, though, Evan did it anyway. They were very important points.

And if Dumbledore didn't understand, Severus would explain them to him to him later so that he'd wish he hadn't asked. And then Evan could see his face pensieved, and draw it and send him a copy, and it would all be beautiful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Some of Severus's best friends are girls. None of them are friends with each other.
> 
>  **Outtakes** :   
> "Ah la déjà vu," Evan murmured nostalgically.  
> Severus cried, "Déjà vu?! Ev, that's French!" and grabbed his hand to nom vigorously up his arm while Evan gazed tolerantly out the window.
> 
> _And then Severus shot an AK at the author, the end. XD_


	61. Hospital Wing, Hogwarts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some of Severus's best friends are girls. None of them are friends with each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : fpreg
> 
>  **Notes** : I had hoped to post this sooner, but finals, holidays... lost my net for a week... X( Apologies to anyone I've missed and for the long delay on the extras; it's been a bit mental around here.
> 
> This chapter is dedicated to Mr. Bill Watterson and Ms. Susie Derkins.

"Moonshine!"

Lily looked up from the probity probe she was trying to modify, expecting to see Remus come into the infirmary. On second thought, though, she wasn't so very surprised when it wasn't him, since it had been Bhairavi Patil calling out, and Ravi was hardly going to use Marauder nicknames.

"Good morning, women," said a young Asian woman serenely. She was vaguely familiar to Lily as a Ravenclaw from a year before theirs, someone Sev had studied with sometimes. No one had been upset about her. A few rumors had bent their way around the school because she'd studied with Sev, but they'd never gone anywhere. She'd studied with Xenophilius Lovegood, too, so the general conclusion had ended up being that she either was a very charitable girl or just didn't notice who was sitting next to her.

"Ladies," Lily said helpfully.

The woman looked at her, slowly, with a mildly curious blink.

"People say 'ladies,'" Lily explained. "Not 'women.' I don't know why, I guess it's because it used to be polite."

"Ah," the woman said, smiling vaguely at her. It was a perfectly nice smile, but somehow it made Lily feel rather small. "We prefer to be truthful, in Ravenclaw. Hello, Ravi, how are you feeling?"

"As expected, they tell me," Ravi sighed fatalistically.

Even if Lily hadn't grown up spending her summers with a desperately serious student of Slytherin (who'd made her quiz him on Machiavelli. There had been flashcards. He'd gotten the index cards from Petunia, with her consent, without letting her know what they were for, and been smug _all week_ ), being Gryffindor didn't mean you had to keep your eyes closed. Or alert the people who thought they were excluding you from their conversation that you did, in fact, speak that language.

She didn't stare pointedly at Ravi's fingers as they flashed the pay-attention wave, therefore, though Ravi hadn't been in her year and didn't know she'd taken Runes (and done tolerably well at it, thank you, though it wasn't her forte). Even though she'd been half-expecting it, though, she only saw half the message, probably, Ravi's fingertips tapping the ogham points inside her knuckles in quick succession.

P-E-R-F-E-C-T-L-I \ N-I-C-E, Ravi had signed to her old classmate with a slightly annoyed look. Lily was interested to see that she, like Sev, wasn't a purest: she tapped the center of her palm to signify the P, which hand-ogham strictly speaking didn't have, instead of using a B. Sev had been known to cross his fingers for an X, make a V or W with two or three fingers, and stroke instead of tap at the I-spot if he needed a Y when he was talking with friends in class, but that was only because imperfect spelling made his eye tic.

When he needed a K, he slashed the C-point at the first knuckle of his ring finger instead of tapping it, which Lily had thought was clever. She'd adopted the system for all the hard C sounds, but hadn't told Sirius or Jamie whose idea it was. Remus had agreed with her that this was a citation best left uncredited. She didn't remember what his substitutions were for J and Z, but those rarely came up. And, of course, he'd always called James either Potter or some variation on that-bastard.

N-I-C-E \ I-S-N-T \ G-O-O-D \ C-I-N-D \ S-T-R-O-N-G \ U-I-S-E, the Asian woman returned imperturbably. Evidently she _was_ a purist—although Sev had always said Lily shouldn't use that word. The question, he'd always maintained, was of whether a given speller thought it was 'more pressing to use the spelling everyone understands or the precise transmission-method everyone understands. Either way the purity of one vital and integral piece of the language is valued, the other devalued.'

Lily sighed to herself. Well, she _had_ studied with Sev, hadn't she. Lily was tempted to tell her the two of them had been making up, but she could imagine what Sev would have to say about _that_.

Not that she needed telling. Lily still didn't know what Sev was up to, really, but she was very clear that he was still tangled up with the sorts of people she'd always hated to see him with, and he had his reputation and she had hers. Telling all and sundry they'd been making friends again would make trouble.

Lily didn't mind trouble, although she didn't like it. Too, she was warmly starting to feel that she'd been right about Sev when they were kids, so she could be nearly sure he didn't mind it either, exactly. After watching his meltdown in the hospital and talking to Rosier a couple of times, though, she was starting to understand a little better that he didn't treat trouble like potions, like she'd…

No, it hadn't been an _assumption_. It had been a reasonable conclusion. Between how jumpy he could be and how ferocious he was about writing down every fiddling detail of every titchy experiment they'd ever done—even in Charms—she was quite sure that anyone would have taken him for a complete control freak who couldn't bear being afraid.

The way he'd freaked out in the hospital, though, and then gone still, and then his hands had gone so tight he'd nearly broken hers… well, Lily had seen him do that before, hadn't she?

Only, oh, every time she'd dragged him to go hear a new band. He'd jump like a cat with a bucket dumped over its head the moment they got loud, and then he'd narrow his eyes at the drummer and whoever was running the harmonic line like he was going to set them on fire with his mind. Then either he'd curl his lip and go sit outside with a book till she was ready to leave, or keep staring all night, making security nervous, while everyone else howled joyfully and danced. In which case he'd be whistling jazzed-up versions of their best numbers over his safety cauldron in the shed the next day, chopping up herbs to the beat.

Seeing him like that again, there'd been something special about it. It would only have been sad to find out that he still cared about her, and it was always heartening to find out that someone you'd thought was opposing you wasn't-really-once-you-understood-them-properly. Lily had had that experience with someone else recently and that had been wonderfully uplifting too.

Though she was going to wait till she had the hang of witches' nursing methods before she did anything about that. Jamie said he didn't want her to at all, but actually the whole idea made him swell up with pride like a spiky-haired bullfrog, so he was just being overprotective and ought to be ignored for his own good as well as hers.

This had been different. This had been finding out—for real, for the first time for _sure_ —that what had happened at school was that she and Sev had had a series of long difficult fights and both chosen not to choose each other over absolutely everyone else in their lives (apart from Ms. Ellie, who'd clearly thought they were both being ridiculous and still had Lily over for tea sometimes, which was very comfortable except for the green elephant in the room).

For a very long time, she'd thought instead that she'd slowly discovered that the Sev she'd called her friend had been wool over her eyes she and the Snape boy had knitted together, and that either Sev's awful friends had eaten his heart or that he'd never really existed in the first place.

Even after Dumbledore had said that strange thing about crouching in the dark with monsters, it had taken her a while to fully process that the bright, quick, steely eyes who'd yanked her into a magical life (too eagerly to be anything but offputting, though hindsight painted it adorably awkward and, no matter how he'd squabbled with Tuney himself, lashed strips off the big boys who'd wanted their pocket money and the girls who resented 'fancy' dresses on girls with 'posh' parents and summer houses (never mind they'd bought the house so Dad could come up for the Assizes, not for holiday reasons) without getting in any bad fights in front of her (though half the time the next day he'd look smug rather than sullen about a black eye) not only had been real once but still seemed to be around.

Lily could accept the idea that someone who'd been a friend was an enemy. She'd had plenty of fights with friends, though usually they got over it. She'd even been able to accept that someone she'd thought of almost as family (though Tuney's feelings were understandable; sometimes Lily thought Sev had accepted as many meal invitations as he had as much because Mum always offered to let him 'freshen up,' read 'shower,' before eating as for the food, and Dad would never have let a son of his out of the _bedroom_ dressed like that, let alone out of the house) was an enemy. Dumbledore said they were moving towards a civil war, and even if Lily hadn't been able to keep awake in history, she'd done the readings.

That was all right, though it was sad and the idea of fighting someone who'd meant anything to you was horrible and Lily didn't know if she could do it. Everyone had to work as hard as they could for what they thought was right. When two people cared about the same thing and disagreed fundamentally, they had to work against each other. Even fight each other, if they had to. Awful, but simple.

Someone who wouldn't do that… she couldn't even understand that. She could understand being confused, not being sure what was right, and she'd given him years. When he'd convinced her that he wasn't confused so much as faking agreeing with her to be friends even though she was scum according to the line he'd shown her he'd swallowed, she'd known she didn't know him at all.

She'd come to understand that he might care enough about her enough to make an exception, _if_ he wasn't just stringing her along, but he wasn't on her side—maybe individually, but that couldn't last if it wasn't fundamentally, and it hadn't been working for a long time—and he didn't even respect her enough to argue with her honestly. He hadn't told her what his positions were so they could see if either could convince the other: he'd lied. He'd told her he was a different person than he was. She couldn't be friends with an illusion.

Now it seemed that yes, he had lied, but not in the way she'd thought. Maybe not even to her. Not about whether he was the person he was showing her. And if she did know him, if Sev was a real person and not a mask Snape had put on for her for some creepy reason, then it didn't matter how complicated the rest of it was. Even if they couldn't ever talk to each other again, the most important thing was healed between them—whether Sev knew and believed it yet or not (probably not).

But she wasn't going to let that be the end of it, even though Jamie wouldn't like it. Her own feelings aside, if Sev really was on their side, or wanted to be, that would be _stupid._ Lily was kind to everyone, she hoped, within reason, whatever Sev's old study-buddy thought, but she only had so much real liking to give for someone who was wet or not very clever. She wanted her friend back, if possible, but half the reason she'd been friends with such a difficult person was because _useless_ wasn't in his vocabulary—well, yes, yes it was, but only about other people, and he didn't understand them any more than Lily understood the apathetic (didn't they get bored?).

Telling people they were trying to be friends again, though, she was sure, would fall in the lip-curling _this is rubbish there is no excuse for it the world can do better with its eyes shut you can stay and listen if you want I'll be outside_ category. If Dumbledore thought trusting Sev to do things his way was a good idea—thought Sev was actually trying to do the same class of things they were and his methods weren't crazy—then Lily would be so, so glad to hope.

Although probably not about the not-crazy bit. Very little hope there. As she recalled, Sev had tended to come up with ideas that went:

o   Lily is hungry.  
o   Food must be acquired.  
o   Even though she has said she’s only a bit hungry, not starving.  
o   Codicil A: Girls Are Polite Like That.  
o   Codicil B: I myself would rather chew my own arm off than complain about physical discomfort and do not understand that this is because I am a stupid boy.  
o   Codicil C: The concept of saying whatever comes into my head even when I’m with trusted friends is completely alien to me because I am a brother to clams.  
o   Therefore: someone I do not despise who bothers to say something I classify as a complaint must be truly suffering (see codicil A).  
o   Mrs. Evans has said no snacking in between meals.  
o   I have a good relationship with Mrs. Evans.  
o   Subconclusion: the biscuits are off limits.  
o   Codicil A: even though she left them on the fridge and the kitchen stepladder is in the pantry, not even locked up, let alone warded, you’d almost think she didn’t really mean it…  
o   …Codicil A1: No, I have a good relationship with Mrs. Evans and must not overtly doubt or challenge her honesty, integrity, or authority lest she come to agree with Petunia and stop letting me play with Lily.  
o   I do not have money and Mam knows what Mrs. Evans thinks about snacking and will support another mother’s edicts even if we have anything in the house—  
o   Codicil A: er, they’re like rules.  
o   Codicil B: No, I swear, it’s a real word.  
o   Codicil B1: It’s not _there_ in the dictionary because you’re spelling it wrong, it’s EDICT not AYDICK.  
o   Codicil B1a: Excuse me for living, I sound like everyone else, pronounce it however you like, do I tell you not to sound such a bloody Scouse?  
o   Codicil B1b: That’s right, I laugh at you. Because you talk funny and very fast and no one else understands a word you say. I do not tell you to change, I just laugh.  
o   Codicil B1c: I choose to assume you’re sticking out your tongue at me to remind me that you’re hungry.  
o   There is an apple tree (very droopy, shite for pies Mam says but good eating fruit) currently bearing in the Eckersalls’ yard.  
o   Mrs. Eckersall could not possibly think worse of me, Tim’s a right bastard, and Mr. Eckersall thinks I'm funny.  
o   Right then!  
o   Mrs. Platt has taken down her washing already so we could ‘borrow’ her line (what? I’d give it back) and use that pulley I rescued—no, it’s fine, I’ve even got all the rust off…  
o   Your objection is irrational and but poorly based in reality.  
o   I know how to bloody well clean things, Lils!  
o   Codicil A: Yes without magic!  
o   Codicil A1: Well, you can use vinegar or a lime and salt or dish salt and half a potato and soak it for a few hours—no, but I already did that, I did say.  
o   Codicil A2: Well, of course you can’t scrub all the nooks and crannies with a sponge; when the rust’s off you soak it in rubbing alcohol.  
o   Codicil A3: No, it won’t make the apples alcoholic, it dries loads faster than water.  
o   Codicil A4: Lily, finding out you’re a witch shouldn’t make you allergic to logic. Yes, the pulley came from the junkheap, but _it is clean now._ It does not have junkheap lurgi.  
o   Fine, then, Miss Persnickety, we could steal one of your sister’s hairpins and make a lockpick out of it and go into Mr. Callum’s shed and borrow his fishing line and climb the big elm next to the railway, that should have enough leaves no one will see us once we’re up  
o   No, I’m not _sure_ my aim’s that good, but it won’t get better unless we practice.  
o   Yes, I suppose the hook would make holes in the apples.  
o   We could wash it first.  
o   You know, soap and rubbing alcohol are _fantastic_ cleaning potions, they work _really well._  
o   I thought you were Lily, not Fainting Violet. Shall we eat them off lace doilies, then?  
o   Fine, I suppose we could rig up a sort of collapsing cage to use instead of a hook. I think I have a couple of springs.  
o   Or we could try magic to levitate them, I don’t _think_ the Ministry can track it if we stay wandless…  
o   …What do you mean if we ask your mum very nicely and promise to play hard so we won’t spoil our appetites she’ll probably give in?  
o   Grumble, grumble, glare.  
o   How does an appetite get spoiled anyway? It can’t have an expiration date. It’s an _absence_ of food.  
o   Let’s work out how to make collapsing cages anyway! Using twigs and plaited bark! Of course we can make it work, I read a book and I have a knife!  
o   No special reason. They’re always useful. I have string, too. And a bag of Mam’s old, er, marbles for ball bearings.  
o   They lubricate, too, if you set ‘em up right, it’s brill, want to see?  
o   Er, why exactly is it a dirty word?  
o   ‘Tuney says so’ isn’t a good enough reason to _breathe,_ our Lil. Come on, let’s see if your mum has elastic bands.

 

Lily had loads of experience with Sev's plans. Suffice it to say she had not been in the least surprised either that he'd fallen in love with the Rube Goldberg cartoons or mocked them relentlessly for making specialized machines that would have cost the earth to do things he thought could be done with paperclips and chewing gum if you _had_ to get fancy (his answer to 'they're meant to be funny' was, 'yes, and I'm laughing at them').

In short, she did not hold out hope for the sanity or feasibility of any idea from that quarter, even though Dad had told her that Sev's sort of plans were basically normal for ten-year-old boys and he'd grow out of it.

What had thrown her the most, though, watching him slowly retreat behind his hunched shoulders and disappear behind his school tie and hair, was that she'd thought he was too pigheaded to let himself get squeezed like that. But she _could_ believe he'd turned that stubbornness to patience. She couldn't imagine holding herself silent and in check for seven years, no matter what she'd thought needed doing.

But then, she couldn't have imagined sleeping outside the Slytherin dorms, even with friends. Not even outside the Hufflepuff dorms, actually, not even when there hadn't been a badger/lion game recently and wasn't one coming up. Whereas when Mary had told her Sev was lurking outside theirs and threatening to stay put till breakfast, she'd known instantly that it was true and he'd do it. That he'd get himself killed doing it unless she sent him off.

Lily had grown up thinking that most of the soldiers in a war became just-soldiers once they joined up, except the high-ranking officers and maybe the pilots, and it didn't much matter who they were as people. But wizards didn't seem to think like that. Dumbledore expected them to do more or less what they were told, when he bothered at all and once they'd finished arguing over it, but he'd clearly thought about what each person would do best when he did the telling. Lily thought he was rather wasting Sirius, but she was sure that was because they disagreed, not because Dumbledore hadn't thought about Sirius carefully.

She couldn't imagine what he'd do with as bloody-minded an intelligence as Sev's. Lily was only willing to _consider_ changing her mind about Sev, and to hope. She didn't trust him and she didn't think Dumbledore did, completely, either. But if he really was _Sev,_ he was an asset it would be worth a little risk to acquire.

His boyfriend was a completely different matter, one enormous maybe. He'd been almost perfectly pleasant, but she hadn't been sure from one moment to the next if he hated her steaming entrails or was willing to be friends for Sev's sake or thought she was a funny shiny thing that went squeak when he batted at it or didn't care about her even a little bit.

If she couldn't figure out more about his feelings towards the people currently in the room with him than that he was devoted to one of them—which he'd been making less than no effort to hide—then there was absolutely no telling about his opinions or anything else. Nothing to speak for him, one way or another, but the way Sev had turned to him like a lodestone.

Which had been cute, but was not, since she couldn't let herself trust Sev (yet?), informative. Rosier was cute himself, in a surfer-hits-the-boutiques-like-he-owns-them sort of way. Which was also not useful (or new) information, unless you'd been skimming Wilde and wrongly thought the two years since school should have been enough for Dorian Grey syndrome to kick in.

And he was nice enough—as long as you didn't mention Jackson Pollock or Salvador Dali; good grief. Mind, the temper tantrum over something muggle James didn't care beans for (and didn't even know about, but which did prove to exist), something judged on its merits rather than _for being muggle,_ had reassured James a lot.

He was nice for a Slytherin, and _really_ nice judged against that standard, against Avery and Mulciber and Black the Ice Princess and Sev, who'd always acted as though being nice was something he was deathly allergic to even and especially when he was being a bit wonderful. But, as Ravi's friend had just signed, nice wasn't good.

"So, Ming-jaan." Ravi began, mildly firm. She had the same gently chastising look she used on her husband sometimes, the one that said _you know what I'm thinking so I don't need to say it, yes?_ "Do you need to be introduced to Lily Potter?"

Evidently immune, the woman, Ming, smiled enigmatically. It was just the same expression Remus got when asked for his nonexistent opinion on racing brooms. "I have heard so much of Mrs. Potter," she murmured.

Lily mentally rolled her eyes, but stayed friendly when she said, "And I think I used to see you studying with Xenophilus Lovegood at school, didn't you? I always wished my House had History with yours. He was in my year, and I heard that sitting next to him was the most fun you could have in that class without being indecent."

Ming's eyes lifted to Lily's. They were nearly black, but the hue was blue, not brown. Even though Lily had hair and eyes too purely colored to be muggle herself, it could still take her aback in other witches and wizards. The expression wasn't ironic, exactly. It told Lily that Ming knew exactly what she was doing, and was compiling information which would influence Ming's hypothesis as a continuing process.

Similarly, her tone wasn't grudging, exactly, when she said, "Phil is my husband now." It said she was following Lily's lead with her eyes open to see where they would end up.

Lily wondered if she'd been like that before she'd met Sev. He could have that effect on people, one way or another.

Warmly, she said, "Congratulations."

Ming looked at her with a smile that was slightly skeptical. So she knew how other people saw Xeno.

Lily smiled, and said, "No, really. I wouldn't have gone out with Xenophilus if you'd paid me, but then I wouldn't have gone out with James if you'd paid me for years, either. I know a bit about men who don't show their worth properly."

"Do you really?" Ming murmured curiously.

She sighed. Looked at the ceiling. Counted to ten. Smiled very sweetly at Ming. "You know what," she said. "I'm very glad that Sev has such a determined friend, since I can't be friends with him myself any more because things just turned out that way. In fact, I'm so glad he has a friend like that that I'll try to remember not to mention to James and Sirius you're his friend as well as his co-worker. That's not a threat, just so we're clear. Only, Gryffindors like to be honest too."

Ming blinked at her very slowly. "I see that you do," she allowed graciously. Lily thought there was a trace of amusement there, but she couldn't be sure.

"If you _ladies_ have that out of your systems," Ravi didn't-ask with a sigh of patience that made Alice snicker over her copy of Witch Weekly, though she didn't look up. "What brings you here, Moonshine?"

"Many things," Ming said reflectively.

"I think we may take breathing, standing up, and wearing clothes as a given," Ravi smiled at her fondly.

"That's very lucky for us," Ming noted gravely. "Many can't."

"…Thank you, Suzie Sunshine," Alice said, folding a corner of her magazine down to stare.

"Oh, so you know already why I'm here," Ming nodded like one who did not understand sarcasm and thought she had just been thanked for something worthy of thanks. "Did you hear about it through your connections in the Rotfang conspiracy? I thought Sirius Black made that up to tease my husband. Phil will be delighted to hear it's real."

Alice put the magazine completely down. " _What?"_ Bug-eyed wasn't a good look on her round, pixie's face at the best of times, Lily thought, stifling a giggle.

"Yes," Ming said soberly, "we know all about your Aurors' conspiracy to take over the Ministry with Dark Magic and gum disease."

Alice started to heave herself off the cot and start yelling, but then she noticed that Ravi and Lily had dissolved into snorting puddles of giggle. Well, Ravi's version was less puddly, and also less snorty. "…You're playing with me," she realized, a little blankly.

Ming smiled, her eyes turning to half-moons. The dark sides. "I'm here doing many things," she said demurely.

"Enlighten the rest of us," Ravi pressed, softly exasperated. "Why is Alice thanking you—would you say?"

Alice, who had opened her mouth to explain the concept of sarcasm, closed it.

"Because I am bringing a delivery for your midwives," Ming said placidly, "and also for you." She drew three packages out of her robes and put them on various tables before unshrinking them. One was a rack of potions phials, shimmering with cushioning and unbreakable charms, the second was about the size of a goblet, wrapped in plain brown paper with string. The third was a large paper bag that, as soon as Ming unshrank it, filled the room with the smell of curry. Really aggressive curry.

"Oh, _Ranjit!"_ Ravi cried, and beamed my-husband-is-wonderful misty joy at the bag.

"Oooh," Alice said, leaning towards it as best she could to sniff. "Does that work?"

"Work?" asked Lily.

"Eating spicy foods to induce labor," Alice explained. "Bit of an old wives tale, but if the brewers believe in it…?"

Ming hesitated. Rather too long. Finally, she said mysteriously, "There is a great magic in it which can work together with the magic of your own body if you set your will to believing in it."

"I do believe in fairies," Alice said firmly, "I do, I _do_. Another fortnight or so of this," she tapped her belly, "and I'll be ready to jump out a window. No offense, sweetheart," she added, and bent over in an amazingly successful attempt to kiss the bump, "but the eviction notice is _served_."

Lily laughed. "Even another week seems like years and years," she sighed. "But tell me—is this great magic called 'placebo'?"

"That was the name I heard," Ming agreed, looking as though she'd failed at a mission she didn't understand and felt bad anyway.

"Oh, you know about it, too, Lils?" Alice asked, interested.

"It's very powerful," Lily assured her, straight-faced because she was telling the truth. Sort of. "Could take days and days off your time, you never know. You ask Professor Flitwick how powerful the Placebo Effect is; he'll tell you." She'd just have to warn him not to explain it unless specifically asked to.

"Gimme," Alice told Ravi.

"It is a most thoughtful gift from my beloved husband," Ravi scowled at her. "He knows how I miss cooking which is not made of limp and colorless vegetables and pies of fried organs."

"Okay, now you're just making fun on purpose, Ravi."

"Black pudding, white pudding, I have no more to say. Except 'haggis.'"

"That's Scottish."

Ravi looked pointedly out the window. At the sheep dotting the green hills. The green hills, her eyebrow mentioned very casually, of Scotland.

"What's in the other package?" Lily asked Ming, leaving them to fight it out.

"A wrecking ball." Her tone was obedient and slightly puzzled. Lily recognized it instantly: she was repeating a joke Sev had made. Which he had then refused to either clarify or provide a substitution for, because he pretended he didn't make jokes and had long ago gotten so frustrated with no one else ever getting them that he'd decided to stop caring if anyone understood him _at all_.

"Then why did you bring it?" Ravi asked in alarm, looking over with her hands clasped firmly on the bag.

"Because it's not a wrecking ball," Lily said dryly. " _Someone_ thinks he's funny."

There was an easing-out behind Ming's eyes, but Alice got alarmed. She knew enough to, although she hadn't been in their year. "Lily, you don't mean it's from Snape? Don't open it!"

"He wouldn't hurt me," Lily scoffed. "It's not even from him, is it."

Speculatively, Ming shook her head.

"Didn't think so," nodded Lily, satisfied. "He'd know I couldn't keep a present from him, and if Jamie saw it before I sent it back, he'd never leave him alone. He wouldn't think it was worth it just to make the gesture. It'll be a very patronizing and useful donation from that rich-bitch friend of his to the whole ward, right? No, wait, he said it was a wrecking ball, so it'll be the old fake humble 'this is so defective that you're doing me a favor taking it off my hands, it's not charity' routine. And she's doing it as a favor to him, but there'll be a way to spy on Hogwarts in there somewhere. Who wants to make a bet?"

After a moment, Alice said to Ravi, "That was rather specific, but she seems awfully sure."

The imperturbable Ravi announced, "I will make no wagers and my curry is mine."

Teasing her Auror friend with a couple of chicken noises, Lily unwrapped the mysterious white package. It contained a smaller box, and a note. Regarding the note dubiously and remembering Rosier's quip about letters coated in nasty things, Lily asked Ming, "Would you mind fetching me a pair of dragonhide gloves? There's a supply in Madam Pomfrey's office, lower left desk drawer. She's taken the wards down, with the kids away."

Alice sent the chicken noises back as Ming slipped away, and Lily grinned. She picked up the little box to examine it, and it chimed like a bell.

Exactly a like a bell.

_Dammit._

Before Lily could even draw her wand, the chime was followed by a cracking noise. A house elf in a cream-colored satin pillowcase, embroidered with a very poncy M monogram, popped into the room. He had a Pinocchio nose, terrifyingly eager eyes the color (and approximate size) of tennis balls, and floppy flappy ears like bat wings. Grinning anxiously at them, he asked, "Mistresses is calling Dobby?"

The three of them looked at each other. Ming poked her head back out of Madam Pomfrey's office to see, and she looked almost as surprised as they were. Saying quizzically, "I think I would have read the note first," she floated the gloves over to Lily.

"I meant to," Lily protested. "I didn't open the box, just picked it up… I mean, hello—Dobby, you said?"

"Yes, Miss!" The elf's ears had been sagging, but they perked up again.

"Well, let's see about this." Putting on the gloves, she unfolded the note and read. Then she grinned at Alice. "Good thing you didn't make that bet."

"Good for who?" Alice asked drolly.

"It is from Black," she answered. "I mean, Mrs. Malfoy. It's not addressed to any of us personally, just 'To the ladies in residence at Hogwarts.' Says we can do each other a favor if she loans us this elf, food-fetching, final-trimester cravings for the purpose of, thereby taking him off her hands for a couple of weeks."

"I'm disappointed," Alice said cheerfully. "As surveillance devices go, house elves aren't even subtle."

Dobby looked as if he didn't understand what sort of unsubtle thing he was supposed to obviously be.

"She says she picked us to loan him to because she thinks well of Madam Pomfrey," Lily went on, "and she hasn't yet had time to forget what the last few weeks of—ha, this is double-underlined, I think it's meant to be ironic, 'being one with her darling Draco' was like, and she can't imagine how awful it would have been not to be comfortable at home for it."

"Draco," Alice said flatly. "They're a Slytherin family and they named the kid Dragon."

"Yes, Miss!" Dobby said happily. "But Master Draco is not spewing fire yet. Only burps."

Plastering one hand over her mouth (the other stayed clamped firmly over the take-away bag), Ravi dissolved a little into what Lily would have called giggles if they hadn't been both silent and reasonably dignified.

"And she says you'll explain why you," Lily finished, looking at the elf.

Dobby drooped again. "Dobby is being punished," he confessed mournfully, and then corrected himself, "Master has already punished Dobby, and now Mistress is teaching Dobby a lesson."

"Why, what did you do?" Alice asked, grinning. She'd spent more years at school with Lucius Malfoy than Lily had. Possibly Lily should be asking for stories?

If possible, the membranous ears drooped more. "Dobby is watering the garden," he said miserably, "and stepping on a peacock egg."

Ravi frowned. "Wasn't its mother sitting on it?"

"No, Miss," Dobby said sadly. "Peahens is sometimes laying eggs away from the nest. Foxes and gnomes is taking those eggs, then don't go looking for nests. When Dobby finds one, he is supposed to put it in the nearest nest with other eggs. Mothers isn't minding, they takes it."

"So you have to go help other mothers, now," Lily summed up. "Well, I suppose that, er… sort of makes sense?"

"Mistress is saying Dobby can go be clumsy at Gryffindors," Dobby confided resignedly. "She tells Dobby you is having very bad tempers, not forgiving, so Dobby will learn better faster."

Ouch, Lily thought. If this was Black's way of getting expressing her feelings out of the way because Sev had asked her to, or hinted at her, or however they did things in Slytherin… Lily preferred Rosier's way.

"I have heard that, too, 'not forgiving,'" Ming said dreamily. "But it's something teenagers and old people are the worst at. My husband says they attract nargles. And Gryffindors are very fond of proving people they dislike wrong, Dobby. Maybe you'll be lucky."

While Ravi asked what nargles were (and did not receive a satisfactory answer), Lily and Alice looked at each other, because Alice knew more than enough to know what that had been about. They were thinking the same thing, Lily was sure.

Namely, that while, yes, of course they were going to make an extra effort to 'prove Narcissa wrong' even if she'd meant them to, and not just because keeping Dobby friendly would make it easier to subvert her information-gathering scheme, Ming could stay just-Ravi's-friend, thank you. Lily had been friends with brutally-honest and weird before, but Sev had never judo-talked her into a position where anything she chose would make her feel outmaneuvered and inferior. She'd just been firmly handed an either/or choice of ending up petty and immature or manipulated in her own eyes, whatever she did, by someone she'd just met. Not on.

Not that Lily, at least, meant to be _un_ friendly. Maybe over time Ming would get less angry. She'd shown a few hints already, at least of being willing to consider it, but clearly she wasn't there yet.

They settled up with Dobby where he'd get things from when they asked for them. He'd been under the impression that he'd go home to the Malfoy kitchens, but they rapidly disabused him of this notion. His loan was clearly a ploy, so it didn't leave any of them in debt to Black so far. Lily, for one, didn't intend to come out of the situation owing the creamy cow anything.

So he agreed to see what the situation was in the school's kitchen; whether the elves there would let him use it and what was available. He also said he could find their husbands once he'd met them the first time, if they told him where to find them today.

They all wrote notes explaining the situation and asking the boys to alert the shopkeepers and restaurateurs who ran lines of credit or were willing to send bills that the elf might carry written orders from them. No one was going to give a Malfoy elf access to their vaults, after all, even if he seemed friendly and eager to please.

When Dobby had left with the notes, Ming was still there. She didn't seem as if she meant to leave anytime soon, either. "More of your many things left to do?" Ravi smiled.

"Oh, yes," Ming inclined her head. "As well as making the deliveries, I came to see Nell Warrington."

"…Friend of yours?" Alice asked, a little grudgingly.

"No," Ming explained, with an air of answering because she'd been asked rather than because she particularly cared whether anyone knew. "You see, Phil and I were looking at the Jade Rabbit last night—you would call him the Man in the Moon—and I saw him wink and I heard crickets. So I thought I would come see Madam Warrington, since the potions had to come."

For a moment, all three of them got caught up in trying to figure out what rabbits and crickets had to do with anything. They all worked out at about the same time, though, that the wildlife was irrelevant and what mattered was Ming's intuition that she ought to get a check-up from the midwife.

Then they all had to swarm her a little, whether they considered themselves her friends or not. That was what you did. Especially in times like these, when the agony column kept suddenly throwing out missing-person notices that sounded bewildered as well as frantic, as though no fights or suspicions of infidelity had been involved. Muggles would have waited for the mediw—for the doctor to make a diagnosis, but muggle women had no magic to whisper to them, even if they were listening.

Ming looked a little surprised that Lily figured it out at the same time as the Ravenclaw and the Auror. Lily made no comment. She reckoned she'd wait a few months, till she could take Mnemosyne Cuffe up on that offer, and then only slap Moonshine Lovegood upside the head metaphorically.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes** : rabbits are associated with fertility in Chinese culture (among others… one wonders why…), and crickets are lucky. However, there is no muggle Chinese superstition that I know of that tells women when to believe that they're pregnant. There probably isn't a wizarding Chinese superstition, either. This is Luna's mother.
> 
> As I understand it, lurgy=cooties. Except for meaning allergies or the flu instead of fleas when taken literally.


	62. Great Hall, Petroc Hall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a good thing Severus and Evan started their last morning in Dartmoor off with a nice, relaxing trip to the beach: they're going to have a very, very long day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : canon-standard cruelty to animals. No RL rats were harmed, experimented on, or force-fed potions of dubious quality in the making of this chapter. Also, my apologies to the Cornish Rex. Of course, most cats reflect their owners less than dogs do, when the owners are muggles…
> 
>  **Notes** : The extremely kind psyche-girl has taken on the betament and britpicking of this story. Apart from the obvious benefits, this is helping to keep my mind on it—otoh, work is picking up. I'll try to keep to the two-week cycle, but will have to see how it goes. At the most pessimistic, you're still getting a better anti-error screening process, and I feel more optimistic about the quality this change is adding to the process than that.
> 
> Well, not work picking up. That doesn't help you at all, I admit it, but I'm sure we'll both manage somehow. ;)

Sunburn and sand in uncomfortable places were things that muggles apparently had to deal with. Today wasn't the first time Evan had heard about that, but he wasn't tired of it yet. Couldn't really imagine getting tired of it, either, given that Spike wasn't the type to either count his blessings or gloat about how much better they had life than muggles at random moments. Evan only heard this sort of smug rhapsody at very _particular_ times.

'Smug' was probably the operative word, there. It was one of his favorite expressions on Spike's face. In the top twenty, at least. Even when Spike was being superior _at him_ , which was not currently the case. This particular kind of smug—tired, hair disheveled, smelling a bit like ozone from the freshening charm, loose-jointed, and just slightly disgruntled over how undignified and badger-striped-obvious it would be to walk back to the apparition point arm-in-arm or worse—might even have been in the top ten. One couldn't rely on Spike to be complimentary out loud, but he could make a fellow who knew what to look for feel quite accomplished.

"I don't see why you have to stay for the sampling," Evan complained, moving his shoulder so Spike would know where his hand wanted to be. "It's not as though you're a commercial brewer."

"I might want to be someday," Severus reminded him, more patiently than he might have done under other circumstances, his back shifting the wistful centimeter that said he quite agreed. "Or have to. Potentially quite soon. Besides, even if I find another interesting project to sign on with, they'll want to know I can brew the everyday things well."

"And by 'well,'" Evan teased, "naturally you mean 'according to the recipe.'"

Loftily, Severus informed him, "I brought standard and improved versions of everything."

Evan paused and looked at him, and then grabbed his arm and hustled him the last few feet off the sand and into the trees.

"What?" Severus demanded indignantly, though he didn't fight being dragged out of sight of the very few early-morning beachgoers, just starting to set up their blankets and umbrellas.

"Of _course_ you did," Evan sighed with a helpless smile, and shoved him against the nearest properly sturdy trunk for a proper mauling.

"What is it with you and me-and-trees?" Severus demanded, managing to sound cross even as he let his head roll back and his neatly tied cravat expediently came undone again, without being touched, for Evan's convenience.

"They make you look like you only belong in a city," explained Evan, somewhat muffled, feeling the buzz of thoroughly unnecessary privacy charms going up around them. Evidently Spike had finally given up on the idea that Ev was ever going to remember to do that: excellent.

Not that his resigned surrender would last. In fact, Evan decided to take it as the tribute to his skill and consideration he wasn't going to get overtly before the ocean dried up. Doubly excellent! He patted his inner serpent on the back for its perception and facility at translating from the Severan and finished, "As if you've got a top hat and eyeglass on."

"I'm wearing _grey-green_. I haven't even got a _robe_ on."

"You haven't even got a waistcoat on, now," Ev observed happily as it fell to the ground. He tug-slid Severus up his thigh—just to help him brace against the tree, of course.

"Now doesn't count!"

Nuzzling happily, he sympathized, "Doesn't matter, Spike. You look that way even when you're in waders with a gathering basket. And then you do something different with your face and you don't."

Spike's hand paused halfway through tugging the tie out of Evan's hair, which was a little awkward. "Would you care to expound on that?"

"I'll paint you a diptych any time you like," Ev suggested cunningly, and timed the bite through Spike's shirt to interrupt the droning _ha-ha_ so the gasp and convulsive tug at his hair would be just perfect.

This time, Spike was more careful about neatening himself up, and even his hair was tidy again by the time they got back to the hall. Partially disappointing for meaning he'd be looking buttoned-up and professional and not-suggestive all day after all (in which case, what had Ev gotten up early for?) the fact that Spike hadn't bothered after the first go also meant that Evan had been predictable, manipulated, or some combination thereof.

Given that this was Severus, that was only moderately vexing, not humiliating. Still: rats.

Ev would have his revenge that evening when Spike saw the probably-indelible bark-stain on the back of his shirt and realized Ev had let him walk around like that all day. Bwa-ha.

Not the sort of revenge that would leave Spike feeling publicly embarrassed, either, which would have been even more out than usual, considering Spike was doing him a favor and would hate every minute. The waistcoat covered the stain, so the only drawback was that it would have set and become stubborn by the time anyone tried to wash or magic it out. And now he'd be able to penitently buy Spike some new shirts without getting suspicious eyes, which was what Ev called a Result.

"You can stop looking smug any time now," Severus noted, sliding him amused eyes as they strolled from their room to Petroc Hall's Great Hall, now carrying his sample case. "I'm perfectly capable of extrapolating from the sensations of friction and damp bark."

Evan let his eyes widen slightly in glee. "I fail to see how that's supposed to make me less smug."

"Indeed, it seems to have had the opposite effect," Severus pondered in a tone of detached academic curiosity which, from his eyes, was utter nonsense. "How perplexing."

"You see," Ev explained, "I note you didn't take the opportunity of going back to the room for your samples to change your shirt."

"It's my reminder to myself that you owe me a new one," Severus sedately sniffed. "It's amazing that you call _me_ the barbarian, honestly. No one would pin you for a Seeker, you thug."

"Whaaat?" Evan whinged happily, and argued-to-lose all the way to the cavernous Art Deco monstrosity he didn't blame Severus for calling the Tenth Circle.

Obviously Spike called it that for being noisy and crowded; Ev didn't even have to ask. It was also, alas, one of those places where the architects had deceived themselves into thinking that just because they could make walls and things defy the laws of gravity with magic, it meant they could do whatever they liked and everything would be fine.

Furthermore, well, it wasn't that Evan had anything against color-schemes where brown and cream figured heavily per se, though they did rather tend to make people squint at his hair and ask him if he dyed it and/or hadn't gotten enough attention as a child. Which he hadn't, but also didn't. Only, it was important to make sure that the brown didn't look organic and the cream was uncurdled.

Jealous thought-they-were-his-peers who wished they'd thought of it first started ribbing Severus over the sample bottles before the table was even half set up. Ev wished Spike would take his face out of his hands long enough to understand that everyone was going to copy them (incompetently) next year. But of course Spike was too busy calling Evan names and speculating on the peace of the grave.

First was Professor Slughorn, doing his pre-opening rounds, visiting all his former students. He always did that, so no one would forget they were his former student and probably a beneficiary of his Power of Introducing People. He didn't actually rib, and so was probably a good way to ease into the humiliation for Severus. He just arched a puzzled eyebrow.

Severus took on an I-have-to-deal-with-this-wearisomeness-can-I-go-home-yet slump and pointed wordlessly at Evan, who gave their old Head of House a sleepy-angel smile.

After thinking about it for a moment, Slughorn beamed, "Clever lad!" He patted Evan on the shoulder approvingly and told Severus sympathetically, "Chin up, m'boy." Then he set to the brief business of sniffing Severus's samples and making pleased noises before moving on.

"And now you're disgruntled," Evan noted, blinking at his friend. "Explain?"

"I'll retract my disgruntlement if he comes back later and asks questions about the improvements," Severus grumped. "He makes me _mental_."

"More than usual?" quipped Evan, and grinned as Spike kicked him under the table. Narcissa was a terrible influence.

"I could see him noticing that my versions were better," Severus explained, "and I could also see the repeated, clear lack of aha-moment. He has _no idea_ how I did _any_ of it, and he didn't ask _one question_. That man has no business teaching anyone OWL year potions, let alone NEWT. Just not sound on theory, and doesn't care enough to fix it."

"I have a sneaking suspicion," Evan mused, "that 'sound on theory,' coming from you, does not mean what it would mean coming from sane people."

"Suppose you found a way to make red paler without making it pink, orange, or transparent, and your grandfather just said 'very nice' and wasn't curious," Severus snapped.

"Suppose my grandfather was implicitly acknowledging that my genius was beyond his stars?" Evan riposted, amused. He watched the hatchet face try to move in six directions at once as Severus tried to swallow the ideas of being complimented himself and anyone failing to pick up a challenge. At the same time, yet. Neither seemed to be going down easily.

"Well," Severus said again eventually, shoulders curling in sulkily, "I'll withhold judgment till he fails to ask questions during the time set aside for it. Which he will."

"Yes, I can see you withholding judgment like anything," Ev laughed, bumping knees. He adjusted some of the bottles, making a more graceful layout. All the bottles.

"Everyone else's tables are just jumbly," Severus complained enviously.

"I noticed that, it's very sad," Evan agreed in a firm tone, transfiguring the table to make a series of short platforms. Severus sighed. Evan sighed back in soft mockery, and instructed, "Stop being so _Northern_ and take out the unicorn-shaped ones. Do you think I should put grass on the table?"

" _No!_ "

"I thought so, too," Evan nodded placidly, and transfigured a corner of the table into a paddock sort of affair. He made it a gated paddock rather than a field because Severus had brought enough samples to cover the Tapestry at Reg's house, let alone a display table. Sticking charms were out of the question because people would be picking the bottles up to sample the potions. Then he added a cave and started unpacking the dragons.

Severus slumped in his chair and put his hands over his eyes.

"The time to stop me was when we were at home," Evan noted, only mildly sympathetic.

"You only showed me the abstract ones," Severus mumbled into his palms. "I didn't violently object to those."

"Abstract ones?" blinked Evan.

One of the hands peeled away to wave gracefully abrupt hopelessness. "The ones that are just nice phials. More or less vial-shaped."

"I like dragons," Evan said airily. "And wyverns. And cats."

"You do not."

"Eh," he acknowledged. Cats had to be considered individually; he could take or leave them as a species. Narcissa's kneazle was a very pleasant lap-warmer, so long as you remembered to evanesco the white fur off your trousers afterwards.

On the other hand, it was largely because of cats that he'd had to ban animals in their dorm after the first term, no matter what school rules said. Mulciber's shorn-sheep-coated, bat-eared horror had screeched more than Severus and scratched everything and sprayed everywhere, and the Siberian Avery's dad had brought him back from Russia, while sweet-tempered, had kept bringing Evan _presents._

Severus had brought a pigeon, under the impression that animals were compulsory, and explained (insofar as anyone could understand him back then) that he hadn't been able to snare an owl. Apparently he'd caught the thing outside King's Cross on his way to school (thus impressing Mulciber and Avery and revolting Evan). Avery's giant lump had gotten it within a day and a half.

As by that point it had pecked everyone and befouled everything and didn't so much as have a name yet, Severus had only shot an aguamenti at the cat for eating it on his bed and hadn't even pretended to be upset. Evan had even seen him slip the monster a bit of ham from supper (which he'd confused everyone by calling 'tea') later that day. Ev had privately considered that this slightly made up for bringing the plague-bird in the first place, but not for catching it quite possibly with his hands, yuck.

"But many, many other people do like cats," he explained, not speculating on whether Spike was one of those people, no, not at all. "Very much. Passionately."

"This is _not the culture of the gathering,_ " Severus moaned. "I am _new here_."

"One of the many reasons I'm staying right here with you to be blamed," Evan patted his thigh comfortingly under the table.

"Damned _right_ I'm blaming you."

"You're the only person I know who can hiss without sibilants, Naj," reflected Evan breezily. "It's very impressive, but the moaning was more compelling."

" _Aaargh_."

"There we are!"

As Evan had fully expected, though, once he had to _perform,_ Severus handled the indignity much better.

"Bit showy, what?" asked a large man in a grubby blue overrobe with an enormous ginger moustache and sideburns. It looked like his original hair color, but also as if it might already have been someone's hair color when people still said 'what.' That is, he looked old enough, or nearly, but _it_ looked as if it might have crawled from person to person since the Normans first landed, attaching itself to new upper lips every time it wore out its previous host.

"I want to paint your moustache," Evan heard himself gush. He hadn't meant to; he'd been too busy staring to think of saying anything.

Severus sighed. "As you may gather," he said resignedly, "my flatmate here is an artist. I do succeed in keeping him out of the ingredients."

"Except the mint," Evan said helpfully.

"Except the _herbs_ ," Severus corrected him, with a bit of a snide note.

"I blend scents," he explained to the man. "For the studio. To help my clients relax and so on, what?"

He felt Severus wince slightly next to him, but it wasn't as though Severus wasn't fully capable of reflecting back other people's body language and hints of their accents to make them feel he was one-of-them. When he bothered (which was seldom, given how much he disliked bending to people that way). Evan had better luck using speech patterns, that was all.

"Portraitist, eh?" the wizard asked, stroking the abomination above his lip in a preening _someone appreciates my pride and joy_ sort of way.

"With Rose & Yew. My card," Evan gracioused at him, presenting one. "It's most convenient, living with a genius. You wouldn't believe how smelly the standard brush-washing liquid is."

"Why not just clean 'em with a spell?" the man frowned.

Evan looked at him, aghast but trying not to show it. "Wizarding paint strenuously resists vanishing magic once it dries, sir," he smiled, letting his eyes droop drowsily so the Severan _what kind of idiot are you_ wouldn't show. "To safeguard the finished product. And it's made to dry very quickly once it's off the easel, so we can get as many poses as possible into one sitting. A living portrait would take _years_ otherwise. Be terrible if someone could evanesce their grandfather's portrait to a clean blank canvas in a fit of temper, eh?"

"See what you mean," the man nodded ponderously. "Now, young feller," he addressed Severus, fishing the cage with his complimentary lab rat out of his voluminous sleeve (Severus didn't howl, tear out of the room, or even stare pointedly in curled-lip sanitation-related revulsion. Evan was quite proud of him), "let's see if your product lives up to those fancy bottles."

Throat tightening from the burning desire to tell him they were vials or phials, not bottles, or possibly to whinge at Evan that he just knew it would be like this all morning, Severus asked, politely and with only gently gritted teeth, "Do you have a particular area of interest?"

It was, in fact, like that all morning, although Evan had been quite right about the cats and unicorns and ended up selling nearly half the little bottles—er, phials. The customers had all agreed to come pick up their purchases while everyone was packing up. This was less, Evan thought, because of his own amiable firmness than because of the way Severus had looked at them flatly and without blinking, with what he probably thought was a fixed but pleasant smile.

As a German wizard left with the receipt for a unicorn phial but no promise of gift wrap, Severus remarked, "And here I thought my spare vials were in case of breakage."

"I still say we should bring the price up and let them keep the samples," Evan told him. "They'll be more apt to remember you're good, too, that way."

"They can buy the ones I made to recipe," Severus said with his too-paranoid-to-realize-he-was-being-ridiculous face on. It was only mild paranoia, in this case, but it was enough. "Some of these people are genuine brewers. At least one or two of them, I'm sure. I don't want anyone reverse-engineering my improvements before the patents clear."

"You're being ridiculous," Evan smiled, "but by all means, protect your patents."

"How am I being ridiculous," Severus demanded, scowling.

"You're assuming it's possible for anyone to follow or re-trace your train of thought," he explained, "and that is, regardless of the subject, ridiculous."

At that point someone else came over to mock the vials and deride Severus for being showy and thinking flash could substitute for good brewing. Evan didn't bother handing his card over, because Severus was in I-don't-know-how-to-interpret-or-react-to-that land, which made him edgy and defensive. The witch was not going to go away remembering them kindly no matter how smooth Ev was.

Fortunately, she put up enough of a fight that Severus got most of the prickles out of his system and reverted to being a salesman instead of a rabid porcupine for a while.

He claimed to hate being a salesman, but since in this case it involved talking about potions, Evan would never have guessed. One witch only a few years older than they were got sucked into his hypnotic enthusiasm enough to start flirting. Operating as he did on the assumption that no one but Evan (who he considered weird for it, though he dubiously-accepted Narcissa's explanation that artistic people sometimes felt conventional good looks were bland) could possibly find him attractive, Severus didn't notice.

Didn't notice at all, as far as Evan could tell, even though she was being fairly blatant. Ev was annoyed with her for ignoring the way she wasn't getting anywhere, but it would have been a bad idea to express his feelings. The de Medicis were Italy's version of the Blacks, only less uniform in their opinions and far less snooty about their children being seen working. If Ev messed up his first contact with their heir, his mother would skin him. Even odds on whether he'd be alive at the time.

So he sweet-talked her into setting up an appointment to be painted, which relieved his feelings until he noticed Severus looking at him sardonically.

"What?"

"You realize that means you'll have to deal with her again," Spike pointed out.

"On my turf," said Evan simply, and the change in the look Severus was giving him warmed him right up. "Besides, she may have been pushy, but she has good taste. I appreciate that. No," he added, smiling and pressing his leg against Severus's, "I do _not_ propose to explain that remark; live with it."

"Moon man," Severus muttered, but, however baffled, he pressed back.

Evan was right about the cats. To Spike's quietly but vehemently expressed disgust, quite a lot of the older witches—mostly townies and the spouses and mothers of potioneers, admittedly; very few of even the commercial brewers and none of the company scouts—forgot that they were there to examine potions. They huddled around the table to exclaim over the cunning transfiguration work while Severus tried to look polite, unoffended, and genial while steaming out the ears.

Genial didn't work on his hatchet face even when he was in a good mood. In the end Evan sent him to go sample other people's things (with strict instructions to acknowledge one thing each brewer had done competently). He wasn't masking the homicidal very well and, while justified, it was making Evan's customers nervous. Ev was fully capable of turning them to the actual potions once they were hooked. Besides, he was free to praise Severus's work, where Severus would have understated everything but failed to radiate Charming Modesty so they'd understand he was, in fact, understating everything.

The pair of witches he was chatting with now were like that. They both looked oddly familiar, considering that Evan was good with faces and didn't recall meeting either of them before.

The younger might have been in her seventies if she'd been using the usual beauty aids. Evan thought not, though, and placed her at around mid-forties. She was slender in the way that could go bony easily, which Evan was intimately familiar with. Her dark hair was just starting to steel at the temples, and although she was tolerating her companion good-naturedly, Evan thought her face was one that spent more time being stern and fierce and proud. She had a stuffed bluebird on her hat, and flowers. If they were meant to make her look approachable… well. Evan would have advised her, if asked, to work to her strengths and go full-out dragon-lady instead.

Her companion (not a wife, from their body language; Evan was guessing either a close-ish relative or a cards-and-shopping partner) was shorter and rounder, exquisitely tailored and softly ash-blonde. Her hair had the subtle glimmer that meant she probably wasn't actually blond, though from her eyebrows Ev thought she must really have been once. The color she'd chosen worked well with her skin tone, at any rate, although nature wasn't always the best color-planner.

He placed her late-sixties. She, too, _looked_ mid-forties, but this one did give Evan the sense of someone who frequented salons, and he'd painted faces with that pattern of lines before. It was a face that spent most of its time being sweet and charming for company, and the rest being sad.

At first he was inclined to think it odd he hadn't met a society witch like her, but then, her accent reminded him a lot of Hagrid's. Most likely she just never came down to London, since she was making no effort to tame it and looked the type to do what was expected.

Ev disliked painting her sort, although they tended to make agreeable models who chatted pleasantly and often Knew Things. However, their spouses usually wanted to nitpick his work and make him re-paint the portrait to make them younger and more beautiful. More often than not the subjects themselves just sat there being used to it.

Somewhat to his surprise, neither he nor the bluebell-tartar had to nudge Sad-salon-socialite to stop exclaiming over the sample phials and pay attention to the samples. She bought five of the 'abstract' vials and a cat while Evan raised his estimate of her household's standing: everyone else had been buying souvenirs, but this witch was clearly either going to put his art on her vanity and make use of it or make a careful display of it in the sitting room. A definite candidate for a portrait, even if he'd personally rather pass.

As soon as he'd put away his invoice pad and put _sold_ stickers on the bottoms of the vials, she asked, "Now, does your friend make preservation potions for textiles?"

Evan blinked at the sudden veer towards specificity. "Oh, yes," he assured her. "I'd go so far as to say that making things last and stretch is a specialty of his, except that I could say that about a lot of things."

Cloth-preservation was something Spike had gotten good at early, though. He'd gone through five years at Hogwarts wearing the same set of school robes. Not with a normal person's wear and tear, either. His had held up for five years of growth, under increasingly intense and chronic siege from assailants who thought targeting one's appearance was funny. Evan did, at least, give Sirius the credit of probably having been too thoughtless and monied to realize that if he'd succeeded in ruining Severus's clothes irretrievably, it would have created a real and serious problem, not just an humiliating inconvenience.

He asked, "Are you in textiles professionally?" From her face, he would have guessed not, but her robes were as appropriate for a boardroom as a formal tea.

"Oh, _professionally_ ," she demurred. "I donate the occasional little bit of lacework. For charity auctions and so on."

"Excellent lacework," her companion said sharply, "and more than a little! Don't you discount yourself because that man won't let you incorporate, Julilla Abbot!"

"We had our fiftieth anniversary last year, Augusta," Mrs. Abbot said patiently. Seventies, then, or older (Evan hoped. That was a long-ago enough wedding to have taken place as early as the couple's OWL year, if it had been their parents' idea). He started trying harder to compare their faces, because a set of names like that suggested they'd been born to the same House. They really didn't look alike, though.

Augusta emitted a very expressive _hmph_. Evan half-expected to see smoke curl out her aquiline nose.

"We have a great respect for tatting and that," Ev assured her. He could say that with a straight face, but it was lucky Severus wasn't back yet. He probably would have managed not to Obviously Panic and be Obviously Furious over Evan hinting at things other people had no right to know (even though no one could ever have guessed anything from what Ev had said, and really it didn't give much away about _him_ ), but most likely would have changed color at least once. "Don't decorate with lace ourselves, of course, but the patience and attention to detail it must require! What is it you make?"

"Oh, anything," Mrs. Abbot smiled. It was a small smile, slightly crooked on one side, and made her look even more familiar. Evan thought the dimple was throwing him off, but her round face was so much one that a dimple belonged in that he couldn't imagine it away. "I only made doilies and antimaccassars when I was younger, but now—oh, cuffs, sleeves, cravats, shoe toppers, dress overrobes… I've even made window and bed curtains before. Those were labors of love, of course. One couldn't pay one enough!"

Evan laughed. "I know what you mean," he agreed. "I painted the elf's room when I moved out, as a going away present. I might do someone else's walls as a commission, but _never again_ anyone's ceiling. Well, I put skyscapes in our flat, but that's _our_ flat."

"You couldn't use the sky-ceiling spell?" she asked sympathetically, evidently now assessing his income at a place where that charm wasn't _quite_ affordable.

"Most likely," Evan shrugged, "but I didn't bother asking the building manager—we took a flat in London to be near everything, didn't want to rattle around the old Hall by myself with just Linkin—that's the elf—never knowing when the dear old parentals might drop in, d'ysee, when I could live quite cozily and _never be bored._ "

He winked with a bit of an eye-roll and she laughed. The thin witch didn't laugh, but had a _you are entertaining enough to moderately ameliorate my impatience_ look. By this point in his life, Evan had learned to take that expression as a standing ovation.

"Never asked her, as I say," he went on, "if the ceilings would stand up to it. When you use the charm, you're stuck with the real weather unless you want to get _really_ fiddly, and we live in London. Also you can't paint flocks of glossy starlings and quetzals and mandarin ducks in."

Her smile got big and real, and her dark eyes sparkled softly. "No, I suppose you can't." They were very dark; Evan wanted to get her out into the sun to find out what color they were really and what the highlights on her hair did. In this light, her eyes looked true-black, but then, so did Ming Lovegood's from a distance.

"Mandarin ducks don't fly," Augusta said. She said it decisively, but Evan, with an odd little uneasy feeling, recognized that it was half a question. She suspected he was being silly, but was willing to barely give his expertise the benefit of the doubt until he proved himself stupid. He knew it, could hear it, was sure he'd know why he recognized if she just didn't sound so _Yorkshire_. It wasn't as bad as Mrs. Abbott; she did actually sound as if she'd been to Hogwarts; but it still confused everything.

Although the ghost of familiarity was itching him like mad, he answered her just as though she'd made it much clearer that she was asking rather than contradicting. "They're not known for it," he agreed, "and there's a sad history of wing-clipping. They can, though; they migrate."

"You don't see a lot of Ravenclaw painters," Augusta said, with an air of having been mollified. Silly assumption just because an artist knew something about beautiful birds, but then, he'd half-decided she was a Gryff mostly because she was fierce and prone to jump to conclusions, so what did that make him?

Evan didn't allow himself to let it show on his face that he knew this was a victory. "And you haven't now," he smiled. "Only, my mate here," he patted Severus's chair, "should have been one, and besides, once you graduate, how important is it really?" Very, very, extremely, deeply, but he hadn't actually said it wasn't, now, had he? "Now, you wanted to know about preservation potions. He's got one you can soak the fibers in before they're dyed, and one that can be used for already-dyed cloth."

"The former works better, of course," Severus said, coming out of the crowd and sitting down beside him. Plastered to his face was the sort of smile that told Evan almost in words that he wanted to go home RIGHT NOW but was determined to be gamely, professionally friendly. It probably didn't even tell the women he was trying to smile at all. "Longer-lasting, and—"

Mrs. Abbot gasped, " _Ellie!_ "

"…Er, no," Evan blinked. He'd got as far as, "Allow me to introduce," before he noticed that Severus had gone stone-still beside him.

When he looked, Severus was white as well as frozen, especially around the eyes. His gaze was darting over the women, like a wand-driven embroidery needle. The cords on his neck pulsed, slowly.

"…Mrs. Julilla Abbot," Evan finished weakly. It was the Augusta woman's cheekbones he should have recognized, he realized now, and the way she held her head.

And the shape of those really extremely dark eyes on the round-faced witch, whose breathing was as shallow as Severus's had gone. Softly, she said, "That was my maiden name. My sister _will_ call me by it. I'm Julie—"

"—Prince," Severus finished for her. His tone was just as soft, but it was the muted hush of a snow-blanketed field, and his long, slow smile was the unfurling of a poisoned whip. "Severus Snape, madam. I've heard _so_ little about you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Evan makes arrangements Severus does not understand. Or wish to cooperate with.
> 
>  **Notes** : Evan's stickers stick on with sticking charms; no stickum is involved.
> 
> Even if it's the same branch of the Abbots as you're thinking, Neville and Hannah would only be second cousins. Even for those of you who believe in the Epilogue, I'm afraid that by pureblood standards that degree of relationship in a couple not only wouldn't be remarkable, it would be approved. Keeps the line pure, dontcherknow, and the secrets in the family.


	63. Still Petroc Hall, Dartmoor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Evan makes arrangements Severus does not understand (or wish to cooperate with), and we begin to see that someone's lessons have been paying off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay warm, everybody.
> 
> And if you make maple candy, make sure to heat the syrup to hard-ball stage before you pour it on the snow because otherwise it's a Hagrid recipe. (pokes teeth gingerly)

Still Petroc Hall, Dartmoor

In the same instant, the Augusta woman barked, “Not here!” and Evan smoothed, “Well, how coincidental, let’s all have lunch outside after the sampling’s over.”

Severus’s head turned to him quite slowly. As blank as his expression was, this was a bit unnerving until his eyes rested on Evan’s for a moment and he unfroze. Then he eye-flailed all over Ev with a look that said, _Really? REALLY?! No, but really? WHY? Why are you doing this to me? ? ? And, really—really!—WHY?_

Spike was probably using longer words in his head. Ev expected ‘tactics’ figured in there somewhere, and possibly ‘treachery.’

Evan leaned in and murmured, “You have been working yourself down to your very fine bones all week being sociable, professional, facile, and reasonably decorous for these peers and craft-elders you came here to impress and get on the Wolfbane Project’s side. Are you going to reducto all that for the sake of someone who did what she did?”

He paused, and added, “Besides, we both know you’re not going to eat all day now; you might as well stare unnervingly at her all through lunch so she won’t either.”

Severus looked at him some more. Evan couldn’t read his expression now, but his eyes had gone worryingly bright, as if someone else would have been in danger of crying. Ev couldn’t tell what was behind that, and for a moment he was terrified Severus was that angry with him for being practical when Severus was facing such a large part of the reason he’d spent his childhood without fitting clothes or indoor plumbing or, quite a lot of the time, groceries.

But, “Lunch,” Severus echoed, albeit in a strained voice. “What a good idea, Lance.” Under the table, he latched onto Evan’s trousers so hard the fabric cut into his leg. Evan dropped his own hand to take over the grip, even though he was going to need it later to hold the canvas steady with. The convenient thing about being left-handed was that he and Severus could both always keep their dominant sides free.

“There’s an acceptable teashop in Ashburton.” The sister briskly proposed a venue in which making a scene would draw intense, disapproving notice, and doing magic would be illegal.

Evan snorted, just to himself, and not just because that option was right out. _Acceptable._ He thought he would have caught on if she’d said anything like that earlier. No one made recommendations that way unless they were trying (she wasn’t) to impress you with their superiority… or Spike.

Who spun to snap at her, thankfully quietly, “She said you were her sister, you don’t seem at all confused, and I’ve never even _heard_ of you. That adds up to ‘you’re complicit.’ It’s been noted, don’t think it hasn’t.”

Rather to Evan’s surprise, instead of taking offense the thin witch gave Severus an appraising _you may be the sort of person I can deal with_ look. She declared to her sister, without taking her eyes of Severus, “I thought that man’s last straw was that he sorted Slytherin.”

“It was,” Mrs. Prince blinked.

“I did,” Severus said, flatly outraged. “I am.” He’d take that sort of thing from his friends, but, well.

“You surely are, Blunt Force Trauma,” Evan smiled. Because he’d noticed that his brilliant Spike had lowered himself enough to work with their perceptions and put some ‘undisciplined’ pout into his scowl at Evan, he smoothed Spike’s hand flat below the table and tapped into it, M-O-R-E / E-V-E-R-Y / D-A-Y / N-A-J. “We haven’t been to Ashburton, so we can’t apparate there,” he false-apologized, not overdoing it. “Besides, it’s been quite a morning, and I shouldn’t care to cap it off with a splinching. Let’s say the Unicorn and Thestral, at twelve-thirty. They have very nice outdoor tables. It’s such a lovely day out.”

Among people, but magical people, and with a moderately-graceful exit easily accessible if Severus needed it. Or, from the women’s perspective, if Mrs. Prince did, although that was entirely preventable. Ev had no idea whether they actually had outdoor tables at all, let alone nice ones, but if they didn’t now they would by 12:25.

Evan and the Augusta witch measured each other. Finally, she nodded sharply, accepting the compromise. “Come, Julilla,” she said, taking her sister’s arm.

“But the preserving potions,” Mrs. Prince protested, trying to linger over the bottles against the drag.

Severus stared at her, then plastered a hand over his mouth and did his best to laugh hysterically without making any noise or moving his face. “Here,” he said in the brittle, reckless, all-is-ruination-and-nothing-matters voice that mocked good cheer to death, and tossed her a blue vial with a silver-gilt pattern that was a setting for tiny chips of crystal. “Pre-dye. Why not.”

She beamed at him, totally misunderstanding, and let her sister bustle her away.

“That does make it awkward,” Evan sympathized, after he felt Severus had been given enough time in which to seethe and gloom.

“No it doesn’t!” Severus snapped. “There is no it! There is no _that!_ ”

“Nope,” Evan agreed placidly. “No one here would recognize being so stuck on one’s craft that all social considerations go out the window hand in hand with all the common sense. Totally alien to everybody.”

Severus looked at him, slowly starting to give off danger signs. “You like her,” he declared, not cold with outrage yet but ready to move there fast.

“I don’t care if she dies in a fire unless there’s some way that would impact the chances of wringing your birthright out her will,” Evan informed him candidly. “In which case, proceed as appropriate with all due caution.”

Severus’s eyes were boring into him, but he was busy considering whether, in that case, Reg would be the one to ask about it. Reg was very fond of Spike, but he’d certainly get squeamish about targeting a witch from a Noble House who’d married into another pureblood House as old as the Princes. Same for Lucius, who was also reasonably fond but far less emotionally invested. Lucius might even think the Princes had done the right thing, disowning Mrs. Snape. Of course, _Narcissa…_

“Bollocks,” Severus scoffed.

Evan blinked, and looked back at him. Or, rather, re-focused. “Pardon?”

The frost warnings were gone, leaving in place an expression that was rather soft, if wry. “I said _nonsense_. You don’t want anyone killed. It’d make fuss. You’d just plan at me about it until realizing the inevitable consequences gave me a panic attack.”

Forehead crinkling until memories of Narcissa’s pointy shoes kicked him, Evan raised a slow eyebrow at him. “Spike, I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes, you did,” Severus indignantly insisted, “you said…” Looking unnerved, he trailed off, and then regrouped. “Never mind. If it’s not that you like her, why are you nudging me at—” he flapped a disgusted hand.

 _Never mind_ was simply not going to happen, not when Severus had called nonsense on a train of thought Evan hadn’t even voiced, but Ev could give him _not now._ “Because her sister said ‘That Man’ in reference to her husband twice,” he said, mimicking the Augusta witch’s tone as best he could, “before you were here for them to care about what you heard, and before they knew I had any connection with you. The sister said he wouldn’t _let_ her incorporate.”

It wasn’t often that Severus looked at him in total incomprehension. Evan would have enjoyed it more if it didn’t look so unnervingly wrong.

“I’m saying there may have been magically-binding contracts impacting the range of her available actions,” Evan explained. He took his time, choosing each word carefully so it came out in Spike-speak, nice and clinical and bare-bones.

Besides, Spike almost certainly hadn’t been raised on cautionary tales of witches and wizards caught in terrible webs of handfasting spells, like the horror stories Ev and his cousins had gotten from Aunt Dru. He just didn’t act like he had been. He wouldn’t understand instinctively how utterly the children of a bad negotiator could be trapped. Once the word ‘marriage’ was spoken in relation to choicelessness, he was inclined to get ornery and start snarling about there always being some sort of choice and neither fear nor love being an acceptable reason to—

Evan had generally stopped listening to the details long before this point (as he already knew it boiled down to ‘be my mother,’ and years of watching his Uncle Orion had left him somewhat inclined to disagree) in favor of making sympathetic noises while sketching Spike doing his flaily pacing thing with the vicious, choppy hands.

So he wasn’t going to outright explain to Spike that his grandmother might well be, for example, legally chattel or made incapable of obedience in any of several highly unpleasant ways. That would become clear, he was sure, as they went over the case with the solicitor.  He did say, “She’s old enough that it’s a real possibility.”

Severus sat back, narrowed his eyes at the table, and thought about it. In fact, he fell into one of those near-trances of his, where he could be pulled out of it but one very nearly had to shake him. Evan had handled two brewers with their lab rats and a family with children who just wanted to look at the bottles before Severus unfolded his arms.

“I was seeing red,” he told Evan, who wished he’d also opened his eyes because Ev was in the middle of trying to fend off someone asking about Spike’s improvements to the generic Shrinking Solution. It had been helping that Ev had no idea what Spike had done to it, but Spike becoming obviously-conscious complicated things.

“I was seeing red,” he tried again when that had been straightened out and the rather senior potioneer had been sent away with a flea in his ear for trying to rip off up-and-coming young brewers’ recipes, and not quite the threat of blackmail but the distinct impression that there would be an eye on him from now on. Which there would. Slughorn didn’t like having his stars’ preferably-meteoric rises tripped up by that sort of entanglement. It wasted his investment.

Evan nodded, “With all the little slash-here-maim-lots words going big.”

The corner of Spike’s mouth quirked minutely. “That was a visual metaphor,” he said tolerantly, clearly thrilled that Evan had remembered.

“All right, then, seeing red?”

Severus nodded. “Once I realized who she must be. I wasn’t evaluating properly. We’ll have to take the pensieve out later, but for a quick analysis right now: did she look like she was confronting a disgusting subhuman scaly chimera-thing from which she needed to be disassociated?”

“Er… not unless she’s crazier than you and when she’s feeling like that her face looks like she desperately wants to either cry or make friends.” It was possible. Evan was almost sure his own face hadn’t turned genocidal since Severus had said the word ‘confronting.’ Even though he’d realized almost instantly both that Severus was quite right and that was _exactly_ how Ev’s people were raised to look at his Spike, and that Severus wasn’t quite entirely a hundred percent convinced in the bone they were wrong.

He was convinced Mrs. Prince had been a Hufflepuff and wouldn’t know subterfuge if it bit her, so he was inclined to take her at face value, to a point. But, well, sometimes he’d mentioned that he’d confessed that he did sometimes get a bit homesick for the good old House common room (mostly the lake view. Unlike Spike, he’d never been tempted to go back and steal one of the armchairs) and then been asked, _But didn’t all that yellow drive you mad?_

“Let’s not rule that out,” Severus said, dark and dry, but then he did his crossed-arm lowering at the table thing again, scowling thoughtfully.

“Something else?” Evan asked.

Severus turned his eyes up to him, then let them fall again. He said, very reluctantly, “When I was little, we kept a box in the coal shed.”

After waiting a moment for elaboration, Evan prompted, “What sort of a box?” He wanted to ask what a coal shed was nearly as much, really, but he could work it vaguely out and Severus would remember how differently they’d grown up and prickle at him and this wasn’t a good time for digressions anyway.

Shrugging, Severus said, “Just boards nailed together.” He ground to a halt with a very tight mouth, and then forced himself to add, “With ‘Severus’s Dustbin’ painted on it.”

Evan took a second to stop himself from asking why they were talking about Spike’s childhood rubbish bin. “Something unusual about it?” he prodded gently.

Severus hunched. “Things would just… show up in it. Used robes, ripped and threadbare linens, out of date textbooks, a self-heating teapot with a chip in the handle once. Things like that. I… some of the rips looked like someone had ripped them, on the seams, and sometimes the linens stopped looking so worn-thin after a day or two.”

Evan realized he was supposed to, on his own, remember the thing that would make this make sense, which was asking a lot. He did though, of course he did: Severus had been named for his grandfather. So he sat back and whistled. “Put up a notice-me-not, will you? I can handle the muffling charm.”

“In here?” asked Severus, startled.

“Right now,” Evan said. “We could leave if you’d rather, but this should only take a minute and you’ve got an hour or so left.”

“I don’t trust you an inch,” Spike declared suspiciously, obediently putting up the attention deflector.

Evan gave him a kiss and a squeeze and a, “That’s my Naj,” and then straightened up and put on a version of his public face where it was just possible to see he was awake if you were looking. He clapped his hands as he called, “Linkin, I need you.”

His parents wouldn’t have had to clap as they called, but Evan was the heir, not Linkin’s primary master. Linkin was only half-aware of him when he wasn’t In Residence. Narcissa wouldn’t have ‘flattered’ one of her elves; she would have felt that confidently and obviously expecting an elf to perform as desired was the appropriate way to express appreciation. On the other hand, Evan wouldn’t have kept up her baseline level of formality if anyone had been willing to pay him. It would have been exhausting.

Severus had startled and raised an eyebrow at Evan a good minute before Linkin showed up; the elf must have been doing something for Mum or Dad. When he did appear, he was in his usual self-stitched suit of long, almost Egyptian-style loincloth and open ankle-length waistcoat, the latter secured across his chest with loose frogging, both made from cloth covered in a thick bramble pattern. Dad always spelled that into pillowcases before Mum ‘carelessly left them lying around,’ because you had to observe the niceties.

If you didn’t, you got cold soup. And not soup like gazpacho, either, or that strawberry stuff of Severus’s that had gotten outrageously good since they’d acquired easy access to good wine and vinegars.

Today, Linkin was also wearing what appeared to be a small colander or mixing bowl he’d plastered over with black cloth and then secured another roll of cloth around, for a brim. Severus stared at it for a minute, and then asked in a somewhat strangled voice, “Is that a bowler hat, Linkin?”

Linkin inclined his head at Severus regally, and then turned his attention to Evan while Spike worked at not falling out of his chair. Ev wasn’t sure whether he was trying not to laugh or suffering from the same pun-induced trauma he always inflicted on other people. “Master Evvie is calling?” he asked. As always, his voice made Severus’s sound, by comparison, both high-pitched and deeply sedated.

“That’s right,” Evan said. “I need you to go to our solicitor and tell him to start working on access to the marriage records for Severus and Julilla Prince. What I particularly want is the record of their handfasting covenant, but most definitely also any controlling spells or financial whatsits that would put reins on either of them, then or since, in either of their hands or in others. Clear?”

“No,” Severus noted, looking at him funny.

“Yes, Master Evvie.” Linkin gave Spike a look that mixed superiority and semi-real concern over what there was not to understand.

“Mr. Prince will most likely be against it,” Evan told him, ignoring Spike beyond a reassuring knee-bump. “Mrs. Prince might or might not be. She might even want to ensure we get access, but also might not have any way to help. And if she tries to help it might be a snare or decoy or whatnot. You understand me?”

“Linkin is understanding,” he nodded.

“Where are Mum and Dad this week?”

“Master and Mistress is in Egypt, Master Evvie.”

“What, again? Spike, do you desperately need the Potable Parasol?”

“Are we going back to the shore?”

Evan paused and looked at him hopefully.

Spike’s mouth quivered slightly, and his eyes crinkled. He reminded Evan, “I’m back at work tomorrow morning, and you’re painting Minister Bagnold’s grandfather at one sharp.”

Ev was crestfallen for a moment, but brightened and pointed out, “We could go this evening after we’ve packed and it’s all empty, and then wash up _at home_.”

Severus didn’t express an opinion out loud in front of the elf, but his eyes were saying a definite maybe to Ev. He allowed, “Wouldn’t need a sunscreen draught that late in the day.”

“Good-oh.” Evan fished out two of Severus’s plain glass vials and used them to switch the potions between the Pegasus vial, which someone had already bought, and a faun-shaped one that no one had showed much interest in but Evan thought was some of his best three-dimensional work. Dad would appreciate it. He handed it, now cleaned of Panic Potion and full of Potable Parasol, to Linkin. “Pass this on with our compliments, will you?”

“Master Evvie is still not telling Master and Mistress if he is coming for Lammas Tea,” Linkin reminded him sternly.

“Er…” Evan glanced at Spike.

“Tell them not to rely on us,” Spike said, so smoothly Evan was sure he was lying somehow, for some reason. “It’ll be Draco Malfoy’s first holiday, you know.”

Linkin softened maybe a millimeter. “Master’s sister is telling him Master Evvie is Draco Malfoy’s godmother, Master Spike.”

Spike’s face twitched, half in amusement and three halves in discomfort (it was a two-wave twitch), the way it always did when Linkin addressed him directly. It was Evan’s fault for not talking about school much the summer after second year, when they’d first started to be friends, and then spending all the next summer chatting about _Narcissa this_ and _Spike that_ and _Spike the other thing_ and _then Spike said._

He’d felt he had to at the time, to keep himself reminded summer would end without alerting his parents to the difficult fact that one of his friends was a halfblood of no wizarding name. Other parents would have asked who this ‘Spike’ was and been alarmed about a nickname like that, but he’d known his were only half-listening, if that. But Linkin had been listening, and elves didn’t forget names that were important to their masters.

“If you could get the records by twelve-fifteen today, that would be best by far and give us an enormous strategic advantage,” Evan drew them all back on topic. That was impossible by any stretch of Evan’s imagination, but if knowing Spike taught you one thing, it was that sometimes if you asked for miracles you got them. “If at all possible, do at least let us know by then how long the solicitor thinks it _will_ take.”

“Linkin is going at once, Master Evvie,” the elf promised, and did.

“When do you stop being Master Evvie?” Severus wondered in Master-Spike induced schadenfreude.

“When Dad orders him not to or dies. So in about a hundred years, give or take,” Evan predicted philosophically.

“…How do house elves and patriarchs survive a year after their House’s heirs come of age?” Spike asked, amused.

“Sometimes people promise they’ll give that order once the heir has attained a reasonable level of success or, worst case, become the face of the House,” he shrugged. “Sometimes the elves care more about the dignity of the House than about reminding the heir he’s supposed to be upholding it.”

“So what he in fact meant there was ‘stop slouching and put on a less garish waistcoat at once, Master Evander, you is in public.’”

“Probably,” Ev agreed airily, and gave an enormous yawn-and-stretch, displaying all the hyacinths.

Severus snorted at him, but his eyes lingered. More at Evan’s throat and open collar than anywhere properly on his chest, so Evan hadn’t exactly _won_ that one. He still felt good about it, all warmed up. “What was all that about ‘handfasting spells?’”

“I don’t want to speculate,” Evan said. “Let’s wait to talk about it till we have more information.”

Severus grumbled something in which the words ‘talking _about’_ were just audible, but ended their spells.


	64. The Unicorn and Thestral, Dartmoor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Severus has a semi-intimate lunch with a lady. It's yet to be determined whether she's going to be his grandmother or dead. (There's lies, damned lies, and history.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Trigger warnings** : persons with a background of domestic abuse making domestic-abuse-like motions. Please note these motions are not made with sufficient force to result in more than mild stinging or any damage and are made in the justified belief that the recipient would put a stop to the practice if bothered.
> 
>  **Other warnings** : bad history. Er, in more senses than one. Also, language.

Armed, sadly, only with the knowledge that the solicitor thought that getting hold of anything the Glorious and Most Ancient House of Prince didn’t want to give up could take months (Spike cynically asked, “What did you expect?” and Evan sighed, “That.”) they descended on the café at 12:18 and Evan explained as much of the situation as the maître d’ needed to understand. Happily for him, they did indeed have pre-existing outdoor tables. With chintzy charmed table umbrellas, yet. Spike’s face when he saw them was glorious.

To Evan’s carefully unexpressed amusement, the witches had dressed for lunch. The sister was now wearing a lace overrobe over red silk. These managed to look quite severe on her, with a suggestion of imminent head-rolling. Evan suspected the overrobe of being a handmade gift she’d put on to bolster her sister’s morale. Mrs. Prince had on placid, creamy sun-robes Narcissa would have approved of—although not worn herself. They were quite appropriate for a grandmother-age witch.

Not that Mrs. Prince was to be considered a grandmother. No.

Ev thought that Severus would ordinarily have taken some sadistic enjoyment in these people taking trouble over him. When the maître d’ brought them over, however, he immediately got into a bit of a wrangle with Spike over the table umbrella.

The difficulty was that, as he put it, the umbrella was a delicate and exquisite piece of charmwork on which no expense had been spared. Spike’s take, on the other hand, was that wizards seemed to think that just because they had magic available to them, they were obliged to use it to be garish and irritating.

Even at the best of times, Spike saw no reason to put up with assaults on his senses, and especially not when he was already anticipating a difficult encounter. He had therefore, endured the highly colored, equine shadows prancing all over the table for exactly as long as it took to sit down and draw his wand. It wasn’t a spell Evan had seen before.

So when the maître d’ had brought the witches to their table, he’d exclaimed his horror in a horrible, phony French accent about the charm breaking down, not to worry, he’d see them to another table. Spike, naturally, being the least suave Slytherin _ever_ , had bluntly told him not to worry either: Spike had turned it off.

Commence histrionics.

Spike had let him rant (accent: thickly local) in front of Merlin, the witches, the other customers, and everyone for a good five minutes, looking not merely entertained but as though it was balm to his soul, and then turned the umbrella back on with a bored flick of his wand. Then he turned it off again. Once he had the bug-eyed, wrong-footed look he’d clearly been fishing for, he summoned the menus out of the slack hands and held them out graciously to the women.

“You know he’s going to have the chef spit in your soup now,” Evan remarked long-sufferingly.

“As if I hadn’t learned sanitizing spells by second year for that very reason,” Spike retorted, pulling out the chairs for the still-staring witches without getting up.

“Well done, tempt him to bring out the doxy poison,” Evan countered.

“Next door to a potions convention? All he’d get for his trouble is the bill for a bezoar in place of a tip,” Severus retorted. “I’m sure he’s clever enough to realize. If he’s _really_ clever he’ll have the owner owl me to negotiate for access to the charm. I can’t be the only wizard in Devon who doesn’t want thestrals prancing through his soup.”

“I will fetch Messieurs et Madames some ice water, please take your time in perusing the menu,” the poor man announced with massive dignity, spinning ponderously on his heel.

“I can’t take you anywhere,” Evan sighed, wrapping an arm around Spike’s shoulders.

“It was giving me a headache,” Spike explained reasonably.

“So you had to give someone else one?”

“It was his establishment’s fault; he can take responsibility for it.”

Evan looked at him quizzically. “Is that logic?”

“It’s _justice._ ”

“It is?”

Severus considered. “Possibly not, but he accepted a post as said establishment’s front-line representative. So it is his job.”

“Ahhh.”

The thin witch cleared her throat pointedly.

“Do sit down,” Severus said, in the tone of one who had been very obviously waiting for her to do this very thing for hours.

“Thank you,” she returned in exactly the same tone, and sat primly. Her sister looked as though she would have wanted to giggle if she hadn’t been all over nerves, and sat with less fuss.

“Now, let me see,” Evan said urbanely. “You,” he genially provoked the Augusta woman, “are Miss Prince—”

“I,” she interrupted him haughtily, “am Mrs. Augusta Longbottom. My sister is Julilla Prince. You should have your memory looked into, young man.”

Evan looked slowly between her and Spike, and between the round and rosy and blonde-ish Mrs. Prince and Spike, who was now twitching with irritation. “Surely not,” he said politely.

“I will kick you,” Spike hissed.

“No, but really,” Evan protested. “ _Look_ at them.”

“You,” Spike accused, shooting him evil flinty squinty eyes, “are gearing up for a repeat of that _utter nonsense_ Narcissa pulled on me in second year on my birthday. I don’t know which direction you’re going to send it from, but I know it’s coming and I _will kick you_. Honestly, people say _I’m_ badly behaved.”

“May one ask?” Mrs. Prince asked, terminally avid curiosity beating her well-bred timidity over the head with a stick. Evan reminded himself there was still a quite good chance she was a worse mother than either of his aunts.

“May one finish the introductions first?” Mrs. Longbottom asked sourly.

“Evan Rosier,” Evan bowed, and gestured to Spike. “Severus—”

“ _Snape,_ ” Severus bit off savagely, with a glittering crocodile smile, boring smoking holes into Mrs. Prince’s black eyes.

“Currently apprenticed to Damocles Belby,” Evan continued as though the porcupine hadn’t, “although he’s had his MP for years.”

“It’s only a MESoP mastery,” Severus deprecated, also as though he hadn’t porcupined. The women looked appropriately unsettled. “Evan has his, as well. Not for potions. He’s with Rose & Yew.”

“It’s only a nepotism posting,” Ev mocked him, smiling.

“Nonsense, your grandfather’d have you cleaning brushes till you died if you weren’t up to it,” Severus said with an approving nod for his grandfather. “That’s why your cousin Ambrose is still only doing frames.”

“Dad’s cousin, really,” Evan explained to the witches. “He’s got quite a knack for giltwork. And watercolor, actually, but he’s hopeless with oil, just globs it on. Now, Narcissa is _my_ cousin.”

Spike shot him a _we could have moved the conversation on and never come back, I will get you for this_ look.

It wasn’t a _no, really, stop_ look, though. “That’s Narcissa Malfoy now, who was Narcissa Black,” he therefore ignored Spike airily, and only pretended to ignore the startled blinks. _Ha_. That’s right, ladies, he has friends like _that_. “And—”

“And I’m sure these ladies didn’t interrupt their day to come hear that sort of nonsense,” Severus interrupted firmly.

“It’s a touching story about family loyalty!” Evan protested.

“It’s a squalid affair about lost tempers, bad maths, poor judgment, and blonds being insane,” Spike retorted, “and can be circumvented with the simple notation that you have noticed that the ladies do not greatly resemble each other.”

Evan paused. Seeking clarification, he asked, “Poor judgment separate from Lockhart being insane?”

“Yes. If I’d been clever I would have let everyone think Narcissa was right. A pureblood bastard trumps a legitimate half-blood any day, in Slytherin.”

“Well, now you’ve got to explain,” Mrs. Longbottom declared with a side-glance at her round-eyed sister.

So Evan did, sailing over Spike’s sulk. He made much of Lockhart’s commentary of The Spat, because it had, you had to give it to the little maniac, captured the moment so well. “And of course I had to draw it right away,” he finished, drawing out his wallet. “Look!” He showed them the little quill-and-ink sketch, done on the back of Reggie’s doomed history homework, regarding it fondly himself and checking the preserving charms again before tucking it safely away. Nowhere near his best work even then, but sometimes the quality wasn’t important.

“…I can’t believe you lug that around,” Severus told him flatly.

“I’m sure you can’t, Diced Flobberworms,” Evan agreed placidly.

“And how long have _you_ been married?” Mrs. Prince asked eagerly.

“Oh, we’re—” Evan started, but Spike cut him off.

“Whether or not anything of that sort is any of your business,” he said coldly, “has yet to be determined.”

Her face fell. “I can’t blame you for hating me,” she said sadly.

“That’s intell—”

“Oh, well,” Evan smiled, his arm around Spike’s shoulder again, “coming from Severus, that was a whopping great ‘benefit of the doubt’ you just got, believe me.”

The familiar black eyes sought his, puppyish in a way eyes like that should never have been. “Really?”

“Oh, yes,” Ev assured her, squeezing his glowering hedgehog. “He said ‘yet to be determined,’ not ‘sod off.’ You’re under investigation, not yet condemned.”

“Why are you being nice to them?” Severus demanded, pouring outraged tragedy eyes all over him.

Evan looked at him, and said, “’Scuse us. Take a moment with the menus, do.” He hauled Severus, grumbling all the way, beyond the tables and around a corner.

Wrapping Spike up with his nose squished into Evan’s neck, he gave it a twenty-count after Spike had sighed and slumped into him, and then mentioned, “She’s said maybe three whole sentences.”

“We ought to have taken more time to strategize,” Severus mumbled dispiritedly into his shoulder.

“Would any amount of time have been enough?”

“…No.”

“Mm.” Evan stroked little circles into his neck. “Let’s take some now, anyway. What do you want out of this?”

A long, low sigh. “I don’t know. Blood? Only, can we do better than that? I don’t know.”

“The answer to that, maybe?”

“This was a terrible idea,” Severus gloomed. “Can we just go home?”

“Of course we can.”

“I _knew_ you were going to say that,” Severus scowled bitterly into his shirt.

“Sorry, Spike,” he smiled.

“You could give me something to argue with!”

“I really couldn’t,” he apologized, and craned to kiss Spike’s neck.

He got a sigh back, and arms tight around him. “I can’t believe you lug that stupid sketch around,” Spike grumped.

“What can I say?” Evan shrugged, smiling into him. “You have a native genius for hobbit birthdays.”

It took Spike a minute to decipher that, and then, a bit choked, he threatened, “Now I really have to kick you.”

“You could bite me instead,” Evan suggested hopefully. “Later on.”

“Absolutely the worst,” Spike vibrated his collar, eyes closed against his cheek.

“Dreadful,” he agreed happily, and gave them another minute. Eventually, though, he felt he ought to mention, “If that Longbottom woman’s anything like as much like you as I think she is, she’ll be ordering us something dreadful.”

“That’s Narcissa’s thing. Besides, I’m not hungry and you eat everything,” Spike mumbled.

“We really can just go home, if you need to,” Evan told him, frowning.

“I hate you,” Spike sighed mournfully, and pushed away. He regarded Evan, and frowned, too. In a stronger, thoughtful voice, he pondered, “You know, maybe I do hate you. Why is it you never have dramas like this in your life?”

“Answers that occur,” Evan pondered back, “are ‘what do you think you and Reggie are, chopped dragon liver,’ ‘because I’m very boring,’ and ‘because Siri and Andi have already been cut out of the family and unlike your mum were reasonably happy about it because our family had the sense to take advantage of the internal factioning to see arrangements were made for them so they weren’t cut off with a knut.’”

Severus stared at him. Slowly, he suggested, “Just… remind me not to talk ever again, will you?”

“Not a chance, kiwi in my sundae,” Evan said, side-snugging him. “I like it when you talk. It is, granted, occasionally nonsense, but I usually like that, too.”

Severus frowned again. “Kiwis in sundaes aren’t especially inappropriate,” he said slowly, looking at Evan suspiciously. “Unusual, certainly…”

“I’m making allowances,” Ev explained. “You have every right to be off your head, let alone a little forgetful. And it’s fine to forget I’m related to Siri since technically I’m not anymore and he’d say so too.”

“…Riiiighhhht,” Spike drawled, somewhere between amused and shellshocked. “But is it that you’re _technically_ not or _literally_ not? And, in either case, are you actually? By which I mean, by what metric shall we define actuality?”

“You don’t want my answer, you want hers,” Evan sympathized.

“Who said you could go around being Slytherin at people?” Spike demanded, looking, to Evan’s eyes, at least as pleased with Evan for understanding as he was disgruntled at being caught out.

“Slugface,” Ev replied promptly. “ _And_ the Hat. Come on, I’m hungry if you’re not.”

There was a waiter at the witches’ elbows when they got back, and from his expression, he wished he wasn’t. Possibly the maître d’ had warned him. Evan took pity on everyone, skimmed the menu, and ordered a shared plate so Severus’s knotted stomach wouldn’t insult the cook.

“He’s not being _sweet_ ,” Severus said scathingly as soon as the waiter had left. “I won’t be eating and he didn’t want to argue with the waiter about it. These sorts of places often have rules about people sitting without giving them money.”

Mrs. Prince made a small, crestfallen, “Oh,” sort of noise.

“You seem disappointed,” Evan noted, kicking back in his chair with his fingers laced behind his head. “What I mean to say is, what we’re here for is to find out what you’re here for, d’you see? That is, it wasn’t Severus’s choice not to know you, Mrs. Prince, but you agreed to come to lunch anyway, and you’re acting as though you’re quite interested. Bit odd, that.”

“Ha!” Mrs. Longbottom snorted. Evan looked at her politely. Severus looked at her less politely, but keenly. “It was _exactly_ Severus’s choice,” she said with a flared nostril. “Just not,” she jerked her pointy chin at Severus, “that one.”

“Yes, we thought that was going to be the story,” Severus replied with a cool, unconvinced smile. “You have been laying the seeds for it rather. I’m afraid if you want to be convincing it’ll take more than hints and intimation.”

Evan looked between the two of them. He said to Mrs. Prince, “I don’t think we ought let them talk to each other. It could blow up the world. We’re right on a ley line node.”

“Are we?” she asked blankly.

“Three line convergence,” Severus confirmed automatically, “one hitting Stonehenge, one passing the Round Table henge and ending a few miles that way.” He waved vaguely leftward.

“My Severus does that, too,” she said wistfully. “I think it’s a Prince thing.”

Evan’s Severus looked as though someone had fed him rancid milk, but Evan volunteered, “His feet go all itchy when he goes out of the country.”

“I don’t think we’ve ever been,” Mrs. Prince realized, surprised.

“Things total strangers do not need to know,” Severus snapped. It was just an _I am unnerved and unbalanced_ sort of snap, though, so apart from hooking a foot around his ankle, Evan ignored it.

Well, not ‘just.’ Obviously Severus was only beginning to measure how determined Mrs. Prince was not to be pushed away. This was, Evan felt, not unreasonable, but also not good tactics at this stage. But then, Spike would be telling himself very loudly that if it mattered to Mrs. Prince whether she _liked_ him, or if she didn’t realize she had this coming, she wasn’t someone he cared about and he wanted her pushed away.

Nonsense, of course, but Spike wasn’t used to people meeting him, liking him, and going on liking him. Either they slowly learned his value/he slowly relaxed around them when they proved less than unbearable, he said something more perceptive than tactful and their impressed-with-him turned to unease or slavering hatred, or he kept an appropriate public face on and they never met him at all, whatever they felt or thought.

So, Evan suspected, whatever he thought or had dutifully learned and might say if asked, he _felt_ that the correct way for _him_ to make friends was to be as obnoxious as possible up front. That way he’d know that everyone who stuck around could take him, and no one would surprise him by taking mortal offense when he’d thought he was just-talking in a safe place.

The problem with that here was that he didn’t want to be friends with Mrs. Prince. He wanted her to apologize to him and tell him he was a very impressive grandson, and give Mrs. Snape her inheritance and the last twenty-odd years back, and show him solid proof that she, Mrs. Prince, had not been a willing author of his childhood, and then go home and slit her husband’s throat slowly in Mrs. Snape’s name while telling Mr. Prince that he was a very foolish and bad man who had made a terrible mistake because Spike was more than worthy of his family and his name.

Evan hadn’t really been listening, just running his foot up and down Spike’s ankle in an attempt to be soothing while he pondered the problem. But now the food was here, and Spike was hissing cordially with a bright, savage smile that showed his canines, and Mrs. Longbottom had gone supremely haughty, and Mrs. Prince looked like she wanted to crawl under the table and just keep going.

Evan interrupted Spike—which he got away with only because they were in public and with strangers—to ask, “Can I be you?”

“…Doubtful,” Spike judged, but only after clicking his mouth shut and three full seconds of blinking. Then he put on a look that was somewhere between pained and mock-wary, and said, “And I don’t know whether my heart can take it, if you can. Narcissa tried it on a few days ago, and it was _terrifying_.”

“Was it?” Ev asked, perking up.

“Yes, you called me Blunt Instrument or whatever it is you call me earlier, but I should have corrected you. That’s her, now. I have ceded the title.”

“You may have loaned it,” Evan corrected him, with a little shoulder-nudge that relaxed Spike’s back—only minutely, but definitely.

“What _are_ you talking about,” Mrs. Longbottom demanded testily.

“Evan’s going to speak in Gryffindor now,” Severus explained, not hissing. “He thinks we’ve gotten into a terrible tangle of confusion and if he uses very small words he can clear it all up.”

“Perish the thought,” Evan said cheerfully. “I think you’re all making a half-hearted attempt to be civilized and invulnerable while trying to ruthlessly insinuate your way towards what you want, and it’s going rather badly considering everyone wants the same thing. I am therefore going to speak, not Gryffindor, but Hufflepuff.”

“Oh, _good,_ ” Mrs. Prince sagged. Evan topped off her teacup encouragingly. Spike kicked him, but not very hard.

“I don’t know _what_ you’re talking about,” Mrs. Longbottom informed them, irritated.

Spike shot Evan a wary eyebrow, which Evan nodded at cautiously. He started trying to explain, keeping an eye on Evan to see if he needed to shut up. “Gryffindor and Ravenclaw are both strongly oriented toward individual effort. One person’s heart, one might say, or brain. But Slytherin thinks _family_ and Hufflepuff thinks _team_. Is that fair?” he asked Mrs. Prince.

She thought about it. “Why do you say the last two as different?” she asked cautiously.

“It’s never entirely different,” Spike agreed. “That is, everyone values some of what the other Houses value, if it’s only explained in the right language. That’s what we mean by talking Hufflepuff or talking Gryffindor.” He had turned to Mrs. Longbottom. “That what a Gryffindor might call ‘ambition,’ a Slytherin would call ‘working towards a goal’ or ‘building for the community’ or any of a hundred other things, depending on what we were talking about.”

Back to Mrs. Prince. “But with Hufflepuff’s emphasis on perseverance, the rest of us come away with the impression that, while you certainly form individual and group loyalties and feel their importance, when you come together it’s for the purpose of getting something done. More, that there’s a general assumption that when people do come together to get something done, other considerations are meant to be left at the door. Loyalty to the project is, for the duration of the project, paramount. Is that fair?” he repeated.

“Your great-aunt is staring at you like you’re a space alien,” Evan noted, tickled.

“And you’re jealous because you think I’m stealing your title to make up for Narcissa stealing mine?” Severus shot back, his ankle hooked around Evan’s now.

“Your life without it was flat, empty, and devoid of meaning,” Evan drawled, grinning at him, “clearly.” Severus tried to look unimpressed and menacing, but his eyes crinkled at the corners.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Prince answered Severus’s question in a frank tone. It would have set off all sorts of alarm bells used by a Slytherin, even by Spike. Coming from a Huffie, though, it probably meant she really was trying awfully hard to be both honest and comprehensive.

She looked at Severus gravely, and said, “I’m answering you when I say this, not making an excuse, but that’s one of the difficulties of being in my House. Loyalty is considered terribly important—some would say it’s everything—but no one has only one loyalty, do they? If you have two good friends and they fight, or someone in your family is against a—a project, like you said, that you believe in yourself, or that someone else you care for does. It can be very… worrying.”

“It’s not an excuse even if you wanted to be,” Severus replied, but not belligerently. “Loyalty’s as stupid a word as friendship or love. The things themselves have value, but the words cover too many shades of meaning to have any real meaning themselves. Is loyalty to a project the same _thing_ as loyalty to a person, or to the values one believes in? As long as a group says ‘we value loyalty’ and then goes on to mean a thousand different things by the word, all they’re really saying is ‘we value not being amorally selfish.’ Difficult to argue with, but it gives no real guidance when any decision needs to be made.”

“Unless you’re Avery,” Evan noted.

Severus rolled his eyes, and then explained to the witches, “We had a roommate.”

“Two,” Evan elaborated, “but Mulciber believes in things other than the pleasure principle.”

“Do you?” Severus countered, a corner of his mouth twitching.

“Certainly not!” Evan gasped, splaying an offended hand across his hyacinths.

Spike rolled his eyes, and every restrained line of him told Evan _want to kiss you want to kiss you now now now_. Ev let his gaze flicker from the food to Spike’s mouth before coming back, through hooded lashes, to his eyes.

“ _Terrible_ ,” Spike told him, shaking his head severely. And, probably hoping to confuse the witches because he was an awful prude, “I am _not hungry_.”

Evan sighed dolefully and gave him a sad Irish Setter look.

“No!”

“Just try a bite of this lovely…” Evan had to stop, because he’d forgotten what he was eating. “Er.”

“That good, is it?” Severus asked dryly.

Evan lifted his chin. “It is eminently unexceptionable.”

“And, evidently, unexceptional.”

“I think that’s meant to be terrine,” Evan said dubiously, poking it.

“You ordered _ningyo_ salad in _beurre blanc_.”

He scooted back from the table in horror. “It’s _pink!_ ”

“It’s probably salmon really. The price of _ningyo’s_ skyrocketed since people realized Felix Felicis is addictive with diminishing prowess if taken too often, and that’s without considering the cost of importation.”

Mrs. Longbottom was still staring at him like he was an alien, Spike evidently thought this meant she didn’t know what _ningyo_ were and felt compelled to give her a Care of Magical Creatures lecture. Because obviously that was going to help him with the being stared at for behaving oddly at lunch thing.

“Japanese fish often conflated with mermaids,” Severus therefore explained, clearly really thinking this was going to make things better in some way, “although their faces are more monkeylike than human and their entire bodies are piscine, other than the head, including the neck. The scales and bones are highly valued by brewers and goblin smiths and the flesh is most healthful, and Japanese wandmakers like the vocal cords, but killing one is considered worse than whistling at night—or breaking a mirror, over here. I don’t know if it’s true, but _ningyo_ fishermen go through a _lot_ of liquid luck to combat the curse.”

“What do they do to combat difficult conversations?” she asked dryly.

Spike stared at her blankly. “Southern dialect?” he tried. “Satsugū throws people off. In a pinch, haiku?”

She stared back. Some more.

“He just gets interested in things,” Ev said mildly, because glaring would be unhelpful (and so would groaning and whomping the deranged lexiphile upside his twisted head. Besides, with no pillows handy he had nothing to smack him with. This busman’s holiday was well accomplishing what any vacation should: making Evan miss home horribly). “It’s not his fault Godric’s hat thought Ravenclaw wouldn’t challenge him.”

Spike’s eyes flicked sideways in a still face. But he kept his mouth shut, which was progress.

“Generally we just remind him what he was supposed to be talking about before he got side-tracked,” Ev continued as though Spike hadn’t jumped up and down and shouted _EVVVann, that is NOT what the Hat said, and I can do my own showing off, thank you!!!_ Which, if you were Slytherin, he had.

“You were going to explain how Slytherin is different from Hufflepuff,” Mrs. Prince said agreeably, and, turning to Evan, “And then you were going to talk to us as though you were a badger yourself.”

Spike looked blank again for a moment, but this time he wasn’t confused, he was running the conversation back in his head. Evan was quite annoyed about being in public with people in front of whom Spike would feel it undignified and counter-productive to snog.

“It’s different,” Spike told Mrs. Prince, “because we understand—or, perhaps, are understanding of, or agree with—”

Mrs. Longbottom made a little snorty noise of impatience, although it wasn’t quite loud enough to qualify as a full-fledged snort.

Spike Ignored Her Magnificently. Though he wasn’t in Narcissa’s league or even in Lucius’s (though he was catching up, there), he wasn’t terrible at that as long as he made a production of it instead of really trying to pretend he hadn’t heard the other person being gauche.

“We understand,” he said with casual dignity, like a cat who’d just jumped face-first into a closed window, “that everyone who comes to a project comes with their own reasons, and that for everyone but the one who dreamed up the project in the first place, it’s only—or, at least, partially and probably _largely_ —a means to an end. Those reasons are what will have their loyalty. It’s the job of the project-leader to give them more reasons, including a sense of belonging-in-the-group, to keep them invested in the reasons they have, and to keep them convinced that their private goals will be advanced through the project better than by dropping it and spending the energy or resources elsewhere.”

“But don’t you see,” Mrs. Prince said earnestly, “That’s why Slytherin House makes everyone nervous. It’s so _cold_.”

“Only because everyone’s a _moron,_ ” Severus retorted (making the eyes that mirrored his go bright with pure, laughing, uncomplicated pleasure, which was a truly bizarre sight), “or thinks they’re so clever they want to try and pick every different Slytherin apart into a mosaic of ten thousand complicated and conflicting reasons unwottable by the ken of mortal man, since such serpents as we can be no such thing.”

Mrs. Prince gave him a look that, from someone Evan and Spike’s age, Ev thought would have come out as, _er?_ She just looked silently quizzical, though.

“As mortal man,” Evan deciphered helpfully. “Read, normal people.”

She smiled at him briefly, but it barely made a dent in the _huh?_ look. Evan considered telling himself he was a failure, but really he was telling himself she was a Hufflepuff.

Spike shrugged. “One works for the good future of one’s own,” he said simply. “The only trick is working out what any particular person thinks that means.”

“Quite a tricky trick, mind,” Evan put in lazily, “when it can range from ‘the global ecosystem’ to ‘me, myself, and I.’”

Spike’s eyes cut to him again. They were really going to have to work on that. Anyway, Evan wasn’t lying. Learning _Nature’s Nobility_ helped, but the book only gave the broadest possible of strokes even when it came to family histories, and it certainly couldn’t tell you who was moving in what direction right now.

Mrs. Longbottom was looking at Severus as if she wanted to ask him who ‘his own’ were. As soon as he noticed, Severus looked back as though the words ‘you first’ were already on his tongue.

Instead, exercising the better part of valor (Ev considered throwing him a parade, with silver and black confetti), Spike said, “That’s the distinction, I believe, in that sphere. It’s a more subtle one than most might suspect, but Slytherin agrees, broadly, with Hufflepuff on valuing connection and community, as it does with Gryffindor on valuing achievement.” He paused, and sourly repeated, “Broadly.”

“In that sphere?” Mrs. Longbottom asked suspiciously.

She got, in Evan’s opinion unfortunately, one of those Spike-grins that looked like a smirk when you didn’t know him. Ev considered it a personal victory that they occurred in public at all. When you _didn’t_ know him they could be rather misleading, though, and that in ways that Ev remembered as being a bit offputting. Sometimes they still made Reg nervous, and Reg had actually been sort-of Spike’s friend longer than Ev had.

“When it comes to means to ends,” Spike said, “badgers of course are famous digs, while we ourselves are noted for not shackling ourselves to any one particular problem-solving method and insisting it’s a universal skeleton key.”

“That’s not exactly what you’re noted for,” Mrs. Longbottom said dryly.

“I did say about everyone being morons who won’t admit we’re people? I’m certain I heard myself speak.”

“That doesn’t mean anyone but me understood you,” Evan mentioned, draping an arm around his shoulders.

“Well, I’m used to _that,_ ” Spike scoffed, and a long, possessive hand crept around Evan’s waist under the table. And under his waistcoat. He prevented Evan from doing anything about it by continuing, “You were going to translate, I believe?”

G-O-I-NG / T-O / G-E-T / U, Evan informed him as they talked, rubbing the Futhark into his shoulder.

A-B-O-F-E / S-H-I-R-T, Severus retorted, writing much larger and slower than was in any way necessary, and with his nail, because he was _evil_.

W-O-R-S-E, Ev explained emphatically. Above the shirt he didn’t get Spike’s skin, and he _did_ get cloth shifting lightly all over his side. U / W-O-R-S-T!

O-W-N / F-A-U-L-T / N-O / F-E-S-T, Spike returned smugly, meaning ‘no vest’ and strongly implying ‘under that floppy unstarched nineteenth-century excuse for a bohemian travesty you call a shirt, which appalls me through your ability to pull it through a tapestry needle when it has nearly as high a thread count as our sheets, which fact is also appalling all on its own, and so are the sheets, while we’re on the subject; _I_ wanted to just nick a, one, singular set from the Slytherin dorms and make do with it forever no matter how ratty it got.’

Which Evan couldn’t actually argue with (at least, the overtly-stated bit about his choosing not to wear vests in summer), partly because most of his brain had been occupied the whole time in explaining out loud to the witches, “Here’s what it is: we came to lunch to find out why you agreed to come.” And then sitting back and smiling sleepily.

“…Well, that was a lot of buildup,” Mrs. Longbottom said sourly.

“It’s equally acceptable to call Evan ‘a genius of efficiency’ and ‘superlatively indolent,’” Severus told her. He thought about it, and added with judicious menace, “Acceptable for me.”

Ev grinned.

“But what do you mean?” Mrs. Prince asked Evan, perplexed.

“Look,” he told her, stretching a little spasmodically because of Spike’s evil fingers, “to the best of our certain knowledge, you were fully on board with having Severus’s mum cast out of the House of Prince, and with cutting all remaining ties with her family once Severus Sorted. As I’m sure you’ll understand, that looks like rank disloyalty from where we stand, knowing what we know. Which we admit isn’t much, but it is telling. But here you are, looking interested in him. Bit puzzling. We understand that you’d like us to think you weren’t, in fact, fully on board, but you haven’t even explained, do you realize, much less proven it. So we’re here to hear you out, and see if you can back up what you say. We don’t know why you’re here, or what you want from us. Er, him.”

Spike pinched him.

“Us?” he re-corrected, making a mental note to check for bruises later. Or possibly holes. Going right through his hipbone. He could put something sparkly in there and start a new fashion.

Spike looked grumpy in a that’s-better sort of way.

“Right.” After a moment’s consideration, he mused, “I’m going back in time and stealing all Cissa’s shoes. She’s a very bad influence on you.”

“I’m telling her you said that.”

“You wouldn’t!”

Spike smirked at him. “Have we met?”

Before Evan could even regretfully-admit-to-himself that tacklesnogging his brat was not appropriate under these circumstances, Mrs. Prince spoke up. Evidently taking his advice to just bring the conversation back where she wanted it by main force (Evan tried to be surprised that this tactic would appeal to a Hufflepuff), she asked, “All right, I understand you—but how is that speaking in a special Hufflepuff way?”

Severus looked at her, and it was the very irritating but actually sort of softer than usual look he gave first years. In the matching kind-for-him voice, he explained, “It didn’t take three hours.”

Her eyes got big.

“I know,” he sympathized. “It took me forever to get used to, but Everyone B. Moron does have a point in that there are people in the world who are searching for any advantage they can find and Slytherin may attract a higher percentage of them. That’s why we have better training in guarding ourselves than do others.” His eyes flashed.

Evan watched with interest to see whether either of them would notice the warning.

Mrs. Longbottom looked unimpressed, and Mrs. Prince looked sad.

All right, then.

(Of course, even Mrs. Longbottom wasn’t really noticing what a rotten job Spike was _doing_ at guarding himself, she was just refusing to be intimidated. But that was all to the good, since he generally was the worst ever in the entire universe throughout all of history. And of course by Puffie standards he was amazing, though Gryffs seemed to have an irksome ability to see right through him. It was probably that super-shiny tin-thin armor of theirs, like knowing like, although Evan would never, ever have said that where Severus could hear him.)

“Now,” Severus said, leaning back against Evan’s arm and the chair. It was, objectively, angle for angle, a quite good imitation of Evan’s best sleepy manner, but it didn’t look sleepy on him. When his eyes drooped they looked hooded, and when his spine curved it looked coiled to strike. The little smile playing around his mouth was at once almost invisible and bone-piercingly cold and very clearly stolen from a cat who’d cornered a mouse, and Evan wasn’t going to be able to take him to bed and melt him shocked and breathless and happy for _hours_. It wasn’t _fair._

“…Now?”

He spread a hand, giving the impression that he’d been waiting for her to speak for six million years and was only now beginning to get impatient. Which in a sense, Evan supposed, was true. “If you understand Evan, answer him.”

She looked helplessly at her sister. “I don’t know where to start.”

“What has Eileen told you, boy?” Mrs. Longbottom asked.

Severus chilled at her, still smiling, so that the air between them actually glittered with the beginnings of frost. “You may call me ‘boy’ when you have raised me, madam,” he informed her, very softly.

She frowned, looking a little taken aback. Trying to imagine why Spike might have reacted that way in her place, Ev could only come up with the idea that she was used to people being polite to and scared of her, and not used to rude people having a point. He was only guessing, though; she was difficult for him. There were Gryffs who would have been confused by the false-mixed-messages Spike was shooting her, but she didn’t seem dim like that.

Either way, he was more convinced than ever that they shouldn’t be allowed to talk to each other. “Severus,” he said for their benefit, “you understand, of course, that Mrs. Longbottom asked that because she wants to know what she can safely leave out to save time.”

Severus opened his glowery mouth to say _I understand she wants us to think that._

“Mrs. Longbottom,” Evan continued before he could, gracious with the merest trace of apology, “ _you_ will understand, I trust, that when someone asks ‘what do you already know,’ it’s awfully difficult for a Slytherin not to hear ‘how can I use what you know.’ Not that we’re saying you ladies would do such a thing on purpose,” he smiled warmly. “But I do always find I get a better story, with no lost details, if the teller assumes I don’t know anything.”

“And understands,” Severus put in with one of his more restrained shark-smiles, “that he _might_ know, oh, anything.”

Evan let it be seen he was trying not to smile agreement, though that was the point he’d been trying to downplay for the sake of diplomacy. You didn’t sidle away from the truth once it was out (especially around Spike); you worked with it. “Please,” he went on as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “don’t worry about wasting our time being redundant, or anything of that sort. The sampling was the last thing we really had to do at the conference.”

“Read,” Severus underlined for him (sigh) without the least change of expression, “we can be here _alllll_ day.”

Evan hoped they wouldn’t be. He wanted to take Spike out onto the moor and ride the wild horses before they left, even more than he wanted to take him back to the sea. They’d agreed it was good policy for Spike to attend as much of the convention as he could bear to, which had been more than Evan had expected and left him predictably plate-mail-backed and fraught. When it had gotten too much for him he’d needed peace and quiet to recover in, and of course they’d both been busy during the Quidditch tourney, so there hadn’t been a good time to do any unwinding that wasn’t quiet.

If Spike had to go back into the demands of his job and the Dark Lord without shaking off what the politics of this place had done to him, Evan was going to have to write Albus Dumbledore a humorous-yet-pointed essay on the limits of the elasticity of Connecting Charms and durability of camel backs. This was not a use to which he wanted to put his time. Nor was it a ball he wanted to start rolling, since he had a sneaking suspicion he was being unfair and Spike wouldn’t agree with him.

The witches glanced at each other. “If we’re assuming they don’t understand anything,” Mrs. Prince asked her sister hesitantly, “should we start with Father and Claudia and Grindelwald?”

“Of course we should,” Mrs. Longbottom said decidedly.

Next to him, Severus was torn between skepticism and the beginnings of interest, but Evan sighed.

Mrs. Prince looked alarmed. This cheered Evan slightly. Although it was probably just a knee-jerk Puffie response to someone sighing at her, he could tell himself it was a savvier and more serpentine reaction to her more sympathetic opponent showing a drop in receptivity. And really, a lot of the time badger and serpent instincts hissed in harmony, even if the badgers refused to think too hard about it on the premise that thinking about social interaction fell into the category of manipulation and was therefore not nice.

“Claudia was our older sister,” she said anyway, gamely. “I won’t try to tell you what she was like, except that she was a headstrong girl, Mother always said, and she could care about things very much, and she was kind.”

“The Abbots have always had a stubborn streak,” Mrs. Longbottom said proudly. “Family legend says Julilla was that way herself and that was where her trouble started, although I can’t say I’ve ever noticed it.”

“You weren’t born till I was nearly done with school, Gusty,” Mrs. Prince said patiently.

Severus raised an eyebrow.

“You are not a midwife,” Evan reminded him. Mrs. Longbottom, who had clearly thought he was raising his eyebrow at her nickname, subsided.

“I am _not_ a midwife,” Severus repeated emphatically and with relief, and added snidely, “ _Narcissa._ ”

“What?” Mrs. Prince blinked.

“Long story,” Evan waved it off. “Go on.”

She looked uncertain, but made one of Severus’s shrugging-with-his-eyebrows faces. Evan nearly jumped out of his chair: Mrs. Snape didn’t do those. Spike looked at him like he was crazy, but Ev waved him off.

“I don’t suppose you boys can imagine what it was like in those days,” she sighed. “Grindelwald wasn’t in power yet, and he always avoided Great Britain, you know, but he was rising to prominence in Europe and making allies in America and, oh, Persia, Afghanistan, Russia, places like that.”

“The Middle East,” Severus filled in helpfully. “Not Russia, that is.”

“I suppose,” she apologized. “We were still calling it all the Orient then.” A little wistfully, “We all used to dream about spices and carpets and djinni and sunsets on sand, and little cups of sweet, evil coffee or fragrant tea…”

“Black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love,” Severus quoted, also a little faraway. “I have a friend whose mother knows an herbalist—”

Evan kicked him.

“Rising to prominence,” he repeated like an obedient angel who was bad at it.

“Well, to make a long story short,” Mrs. Prince said sadly, “when I was very young, Grindelwald was using the Muggle war as a smoke-screen, you might say. Even the Muggles had begun to accept female nurses, after Florence Nightingale and her ladies proved themselves in the Crimea. Claudia had always had high marks in DADA, so she took Emergency Mediwitch training and went to France to help in any way she could. She died in the Battle of Verdun. The muggles said it was a grenade, but her friends thought it was a disemboweling curse.”

Evan looked at Spike. He seemed caught between a wince, a _well, of course one would do SOMETHING,_ and the intense desire to say something scathing. Probably about France. He kept his mouth shut, though.

As did Evan. The thing about socially-mandated platitudes was that they sounded like socially-mandated platitudes. When you were murmuring them to strangers about people who’d been dead for decades, it was even worse than when you were falling back on them because you couldn’t think what else to say to a friend. So he just nodded gravely, with respect.

“I never knew her, really,” Mrs. Prince said with regret. “Mother didn’t like to have two children in the house at a time unless one was old enough to sit for the other. She waited until Claudia was nearly done with school before having me, and nearly as long afterwards before she had Gusty.”

Severus opened his mouth.

“You are not a midwife,” Evan said again, smiling at him.

“I just wanted to know what potion she used,” Severus grumbled petulantly. “Because I’m a _brewer_.”

“I’m afraid I’ve no idea,” Mrs. Prince sighed. “She died of dragonpox when Augusta was two.”

“Pity,” Severus said. He wasn’t commiserating, but he didn’t quite sound as if he only meant the potion.

“Yes,” Mrs. Longbottom said sharply. “It was.” Severus nodded equably, as though this hadn’t been a reprimand at all.

“Well, as I grew up,” Mrs. Prince said, “Grindelwald was, as I said, rising to power, and he was becoming less subtle about it. He was leaving Britain more or less alone, but many of us at Hogwarts were… let’s say concerned. We didn’t know _why_ he was leaving us alone—”

“And when you don’t know why,” Severus nodded, “it could stop at any time and you’ll never see it coming.” He shifted his weight towards Evan. Ev didn’t think he even realized he’d done it.

After a not-physically-gape-jawed moment, Even wrote D-O-N-T / B-E / A-N / I-D-I-O-T /D-I-C-E-D / F into his side, very hard. Severus’s eyes shifted to him, but they were unreadable, and he gave no other indication he’d understood.

“Exactly,” Mrs. Prince nodded. “But even if he never did turn to us, he was doing awful things. That place they have him in now, Nurmengard, by 1930 we’d begun to hear there were… _experiments_. On muggles and squibs, you know.” She shuddered.

“Wait,” Severus said, resigned. “I think I can finish this story. You and your friends wanted to go off and fight him. Having already lost one daughter and with no living wife to brain him with a frying pan, your father decided marrying you off would stop you going.”

She stared at him, her black eyes wide in the impressed and astonished way that eyes like that should never, ever be. “How did you know?” she gasped.

“Because it was _obvious_ and _predictable_ and I’m not a _complete moron,_ ” Severus snapped. Evan had to agree. Usually he had about as much luck keeping up with Spike’s leap-of-lightning conclusions as Spike had following offensive socializing, but this time he’d been right there with him. Trying not to think it was because the woman was so very Hufflepuff, he sadly realized that it was probably more to the point that he knew exactly what kind of family the Abbots had been in 1930, because so many of his parents’ friends and friends’ parents were still exactly like that. “What I don’t see is where any of this gets you off.”

“Two Noble Houses,” Evan murmured, “both alike in hidebound patriarchy…”

“Don’t help her,” Severus told him. “Or at least, if you’re going to, attempt to make sense.”

“I don’t get points for the—”

“No,” Severus lied, leaning into him, finishing more truthfully, “I hate that one.”

Evan sighed dramatically, and tightened his arm around him. “I am making sense, though,” he mentioned.

“I can see you have an hypothesis,” Severus sort-of-agreed, in a jaundiced tone. “But let them come up with—I mean, tell their own story themselves, why don’t you.”

“Neither of you is making the least sense,” Mrs. Longbottom contradicted crossly.

“I just want to get out of here sometime today,” Evan said reasonably. “Before dark, for preference.”

“Oh, dear god,” Spike glowered, amused with him, “don’t _whine_.” He turned to Mrs. Prince. “All right. This, I gather, is where your husband becomes important.”

“Well,” she temporized, “not quite yet. It’s more where his mother becomes important. His father was already dead, but his mother—she was an Ollivander, you know, born Garnet Ollivander. That family’s inclined to be traditional anyway, but she’d spent the last, oh! I don’t know how many years in Jamestown as ambassador to Gloriana, and… I don’t know if you know what things were like in North America in the twenties and then in the thirties; I’ve heard that Professor Binns hasn’t been quite as good since he died.”

“I don’t,” Evan said, largely for the record.

“And she won’t be able to describe the twenties if she tries,” Spike told him definitely. “Ask Luke. Block off the afternoon. For the purpose, let it suffice that at the turn of the decade, the muggles went from a national broad-strokes mindset that was extraordinarily and obnoxiously giddy, frivolous, and consumer-oriented to one of everyone being beggars for knuts and apples in dust-choked streets, yearning for humiliating, back-breaking, low-wage work, hoarding newspapers for warmth, envying and deeply resenting a diamond-strewn few who callously paraded in front of them in ermines. And Gloriana’s so much more closely integrated with the United States than Wizarding Britain is with the United Kingdom—most of the North American wizarding nation-states with strong European derivation are, though don’t ask about Jamestown, Baton Noir, or Atlantis—that the American wizards were tasting every bitter, mutually hateful second of it right on their tongues and up their noses. Chicken in every pot my _eye_. Chicken in every government posting’s more usual.”

The women stared at him.

“Personally,” Evan told them proudly, snugging Severus’s arm, “ _I_ paint in oils.”

“Personally,” Severus said silkily, his lips curling into what one might call a smile if one was really stupid, “I grew up in a chronically failing factory town. Do go on, madam.”

Evan shot him an alarmed look.

Severus looked with critical, skeptical judgment at Evan’s outfit, judged his three-minute hair less harshly, forgave him for his existence and income bracket by leaning in a little, and returned the laser focus of his attention back to his grandmother. Evan breathed.

“Well,” Mrs. Prince said uneasily, intelligently looking as if she wanted to edge away (her sister nudged her, not very subtly), “Mother Garnet had been the Ambassador to the States for a long time, as I said, all through that silliness. When she and father were negotiating my and Var’s betrothal—er, Severus’s, that is, my husband, he tells his friends to call him Verus but it’s still a bit of a mouthful for me…”

“Varus, Varus,” Severus murmured nastily, “give me back my Eagles!”

“…What?”

“Quoting,” Evan said. “He does that.” B-E / N-I-C-E, he tapped into Severus’s palm, lightly and playfully.

N-O, Severus tapped back, and stole a truculent but cautious look at him. Evan grinned (because kissing him would be inappropriate in front of people and would also get his foot stepped on), and Spike relaxed. “When your betrothal was being negotiated,” he prompted impatiently.

“Yes,” she said meaninglessly, a bit flustered. “Well, she’d formed the opinion by then, you see, that young people were flighty and shouldn’t be trusted to make decisions, and modern girls were…”

“Flappers,” Severus took pity.

“Yes,” she said with a little nose-wrinkle. “Merlin knows what she would have thought about young girls _these_ days!”

“Pity we can’t introduce her to Wilkes,” Severus told Evan wistfully.

“All right, you don’t have to be nice,” Evan tried not to laugh, “but there are _limits,_ Your Malevolence.”

“She’s clearly being painted as the ultimate co-author of all my mother’s woes,” Severus said petulantly. “As she’s beyond _actually_ being affected by anything in this mortal realm, I don’t see why I can’t fantasize about giving her a fit of the vapors.”

“Do you want a picture?” Evan chuckled.

Spike’s eyes lit up. “YES!” He held his hand out to the women imperiously. “Photo, please. Evan wants to make a sketch.”

They looked at him like he was mad, which was moderately perceptive, but also as though they hadn’t realized yet that this was wonderful. “I’m afraid I don’t carry photographs of my late mother-in-law,” Mrs. Prince said carefully.

Severus sulked at her, still too charmed by the image of shoving Wilkes at the evil dead woman in his mind to make more than a token effort. Waving a languorous, disappointed hand, he droned, “Fine. The lady decided you must be a mental mayfly based on your birthdate, and?”

“And my father was _very_ concerned to see I didn’t go involving myself in anything dangerous,” she sighed, “so the handfasting covenant was quite… traditional. It gave Var quite a lot of deciding power on major decisions.”

Evan nodded, unsurprised.

“So men are less flighty and more sensible?” Severus drawled. “Had your mother-in-law the Ambassador _met_ any?”

“You’re thinking about Luke right now, I can tell,” Evan noted.

“Well, compared with Narcissa, I suppose,” he said. “But I’m also thinking about Reggie, and Avery, and Mulciber, and Potter’s gang, and Lovegood, and Ranjit Patil compared with _his_ wife, and Bast Lestrange and his delightful little cabal. Then there’s our neighbors; compare Neil Fudge with Amy Bones. And, wait for it, _Lockhart…_ ”

“Narcissa and Wilkes’ roommates were awfully silly, too,” Evan pointed out, letting a smile tug his mouth up. “You know, Severus, it might not be so much a gender thing as you being just generally surrounded by idiots.”

Severus blinked at him more times than Evan was expecting, and then his eyes took on an amused glint. “Well, there were a couple of years there where I was rather surrounded by idiots _on drugs,_ ” he mused.

“There you are, then,” Ev said comfortably. He’d quite enjoyed being one of the idiots until he realized how much the drifting unreality of it felt like being bored in summer, and noticed that Spike had mostly stopped mocking them in favor of doing his homework. In the library.

“Someone needs to punch Slughorn in the moustache, really,” Severus groused. “Lazy arse, letting everyone get up to god-knows-what, never mind no one knows what it’ll do to them…” he shook himself. “Right, why exactly did the lady believe her paragon of a son was more to be trusted, other than being hers?” he asked cynically.

“Oh, it wasn’t that he was a man,” she explained. “He’s a bit older than I am, you see.”

“Fifteen years older,” Mrs. Longbottom clipped off.

Severus raised an eyebrow, looking more silenced than as if he was restraining himself.

“It’s not that uncommon in arranged marriages,” Evan told him, squeezing his hand. “A bit on the long side of the gap these days, but when you think about it in economic terms and aren’t sentimental it’s sensible. A young woman marries a man with an established career who can be the breadwinner while she raises a few kids. Once they’re at Hogwarts or wherever, she can start establishing her own career. By the time he’s ready to retire, she’s bringing in the money, and by the time she’s done, they can be supported by the kids, if they haven’t earned enough to live on their interest and savings.”

“But I imagine the mistresses, boyfriends, and blackmail would eat up a considerable amount of those savings,” Severus drawled.

“As a rule,” Evan agreed cheerfully. Mrs. Prince looked shocked.

“And why,” Severus demanded, “did you put up with this?”

She frowned. “I… I don’t understand?”

He gritted his teeth. “Why,” he said, very slowly and distinctly, “did you agree to be sold off to a man fifteen years your senior—and you haven’t made it sound as if you were even friends—under a contract which would leave you with so little power as you suggest.”

She shrugged, unhappily baffled with Severus. “Well, I can’t say I was _thrilled_ about it, but my father was certain it was the best thing.”

Severus stared at her flatly.

“He was my _father_ ,” she explained.

Severus continued to stare at her flatly.

“Some people’s fathers inspire respect,” Evan explained helpfully, knowing perfectly well Severus did not need this explained. “Actually, it’s expected.”

The drama queen slid a skeptical glance at him, for continued effect. Evan bit down on a laugh.

“Besides,” Mrs. Prince said, “Var’s always been a very handsome man.”

“That’s it, he dies,” Severus said instantly.

Impressively realizing this was ignorable, probably because Ev had sighed at him, Mrs. Prince went on. “We may not have been close, and he may be, well… he can be a bit of a stickler and we don’t always agree even on quite important things, and it can be terribly frustrating, but he’s an honorable man, and he’s always been kind to me.”

“So are they all, all honorable men,” Severus snarled.

“I don’t understand.”

“He thinks it’s a bit rich you can call a man honorable after he disowned his daughter for getting married,” Evan said levelly.

“By his own code,” she started.

Severus cut her off with an impatient wave. “Never mind that,” he snapped. “I understand that. What I still do not understand is why you _abided by this godforsaken ‘handfasting contract’_ and let him make all these _quite important decisions_ you allegedly didn’t agree with!”

She frowned at him, utterly bewildered. “But it was our handfasting covenant,” she underlined. “I didn’t have a choice.”

With such tight discipline that the next table didn’t even look up, Severus slammed his palms down on the table and jolted forwards, eyes blazing. “Of course you had a choice,” he snarled. “So there was a contract. _Who the fuck cares._ Wasn’t she your _child?_ Is a piece of paper more important than your _daughter? Tear up the fucking contract_.”

“A—what?” she gasped. “A—but—I, I _can’t,_ you _can’t—what_ piece of paper?”

“The _contract_ ,” Severus yelled at her in his special deadly low-volume screaming-at-you whisper. “All right, you had an agreement. Re-negotiate! Break it! How much of a cow—”

“Spike,” Evan managed. He’d been trying not to use nicknames in front of strangers, but at this point he was impressed with himself for speaking out loud at all: a piano had just fallen on his head. Complete with horrible jangling cacophony in his hears and everything.

He must have sounded really strange, because Severus actually shut up and looked at him. “Ev?” He sounded worried, too.

“She couldn’t—if she’s telling the truth, she couldn’t break it.” He felt a bit dizzy, and the air was wrong. Like when he was getting over a cold, and everything actually looked normal but he _felt_ as if everything looked far away. His fingers were numb. “I have to go kill your mother now.”

Severus was looking at him cock-eyed. “You’re… not going to do that,” he informed Evan carefully.

“No, I really am,” he nodded, very slowly in case his head rolled off. “Because I’ve just found out you would have married me a year ago if she hadn’t kept you pig-ignorant about how wizards live.”

Severus cast a glass of ice water right up his nose. Which, he realized when he could breathe again, he ought to have expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes** : Severus's blurb on the 20's and 30's is driven more by his demographic circumstances and who he's talking about and the occasional black-and-white Hollywood flick he managed to see than by accuracy or any desire to be fair to the decades in question. My beta, on reading it, howled like an anguished Grim and whaled on him, Lucius, and Madam Pince with a frying pan (since it would go through Binns). Do Not Quote Him.
> 
> But do watch Philadelphia Story, Holiday (not the same as Roman Holiday), and My Man Godfrey. But also read or watch Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on their Toes.


	65. Spinner's End, Nelson, Lancashire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in. Family is where, when you visit, everyone feels free to behave like a bunch of drunk monkeys on steroids.  
>  **ETA 4/6** : Illo!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Disclaimer/TRIGGER WARNINGS:**  
>  1: Period-and-demographic-appropriate homophobic, thaumophobic, and transphobic language (although the user is trying pretty hard, these days).  
> 2: Sex-changes not treated with appropriate gravity at all.  
> 2a: Certain attitudes held and pronouns used by certain characters (including in their heads/the prose) are NOT endorsed or considered acceptable behavior by the author.  
> 3: References to domestic abuse and forgiveness
> 
>  **Story note** : the narrator has now been sober nearly and only four years. The correlation between that length of time and the fact that Severus spent his last two Hogwarts summers away from home is both strong and mutually causative.
> 
> **IMPORTANT NOTE **: Usually, the chapters in this and the gen version of Valley are very similar, but I’m trying something different this time.[The other Chapter 65](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9920703/65/Valley-of-the-Shadow-gen) is a Marauders scene in Godric’s Hollow. This post will have its important take-aways covered later on, but it will not be posted here.****

Toby was watching _Dick Turpin_ when the door banged open. He grabbed for the Barman’s Friend he kept between the cushion and the arm of the sofa, but it was no good. Didn’t matter how much thicker than a twig a club was, if the twig had some bits of creepy animals that shouldn’t exist in it, the club would lose every time.

So instead he just turned the advert off and said cautiously, “Neythen, our Seth.”

“Da,” Seth greeted him, as if it hadn’t been years since they’d seen each other and quite civilly for how he’d nearly broken down the door. He was polite enough not to actually have his wand out of its sheath, though he had on that tight glittery, shark grin that meant anyone who gave him the slightest provocation might find themselves with a blue jaw or their trousers on fire. “Where’s Mam?”

His left hand was balled in the collar of a broad-shouldered, blue-eyed obvious-wizard about his own age. His red-blond hair was pulled back in a club and dripping all over his face, but still not as limp as Seth’s, and he looked as shell-shocked as a grown man being hauled about by the collar by a shorter bloke might be expected to look. The collar was on a shirt about the color of brown mustard with a posh drape, no starch at all, under a half-cape that looked like it came out of a windy day in the comics and a waistcoat with nearly real-looking blue flowers and golden butterflies that were, to Toby’s disgust, actually moving as if there was a breeze in there.

“Who’s your mate?” Toby asked cautiously. Seth might still dress odd, but at least now he could buy clothes for himself it was a _clearly professional_ odd.

Seth bared his teeth in a horsey snarl of a smile. “This is Evan,” he purred. “My girlfriend.”

‘Evan’ stopped looking shellshocked in favor of mildly confused, although not as indignant as Toby would have expected. But then magic folk were, he’d known for ages, not right in the head.

“Looks like your boyfriend to me, boy,” he growled, massaging the bones around his eyes.

“Oh, right,” Seth said brightly, in one of his savagely cheerful damn the torpedoes full speed ahead moods. He pulled a tiny hippopotamus made of amber glass out of god-knew-where and shoved it in ‘Evan’s’ face. “Drink.”

“All right,” the blond wizard drawled, compliant and obedient but so plummy it made Toby’s back teeth hurt. “Why?”

From between his front teeth, Seth gritted, still snarl-grinning, “Because I am angry with you.”

The wizard blinked. “I’m drinking this because you’re _mad_ at me?”

Seth regarded him, head tilted. “Later on you will have drunk it because… for other reasons. You are drinking it _now_ because you flubbed the landing and deserve humiliation before… because punishment must be immediate to be effective; for theoretically-sentient beings, positive feedback can wait.”

“Oh, I see,” the wizard said, perking up, and told no one in particular, “I love cobras.” Seeing Toby staring at his non-sequitur, he explained, “They’re so direct.”

If that was direct, Toby not only didn’t want twisty or cloudy, he wanted to go to bed right now with his head under the pillow. Or, for preference, at the bottom of a pint of lager.

“Do I have to pinch your infinitesimal nose?” Seth demanded.

“I’m drinking it, I’m drinking it,” the wizard laughed. He tapped the hippo’s snout with his finger, and it promptly had the bad manners to open. When he’d drunk, there was a moment where Toby’s eyes refused to focus on him. Then he was a few inches shorter, with more delicate bones, a smaller, more pointed chin, fuller lips, and, (cough) filling out his waistcoat in a quite different way. “Now my trousers don’t fit right,” he—she complained, as though no devilish miracles had just turned his—her body inside out and upside down as God had never intended, right there in Toby’s living room with no fuss whatsoever.

“So fix them,” Seth said, evidently unaffected in any way. Toby gritted his teeth. Seth was flaunting everything just to piss him off. Completely on purpose.

“Yes, but it never comes back quite right and then Twillfit will come after me with a pincushion.”

“Good, you deserve it,” Seth said unfeelingly.

‘Evan’ sighed, and tapped his—her waist with her own wand. Toby had been in textiles when he could get real work, not carpentry, but it looked like rosewood or cherrywood to him, maybe mahogany, beautifully carved. Not like Seth’s pale stick that almost looked like that Nottingham clown had just plucked the reed out of a pond and peeled it. Her—his—its clothes cinched sharply in to show off a curvy, athletic figure, like an oversized jockey.

“Show-off,” Seth noted. Now he did have a feeling, apparently, but it was ‘amused.’

Toby sighed. His son was clearly _dead_. “Speaking of showing off, did you just come to flash your magic about, or did you want something?”

“I already asked you where Mam is,” Seth reminded him with unbelievably snide gentleness. Or it would have been unbelievable, if Toby hadn’t lived with the brat sixteen years.

“Kitchen,” he grunted, and settled back into the sofa, reaching for the remote.

But, “ _MAM!”_ Seth bellowed—really bellowed, making the most of that deep voice he’d gotten from god-knew-where, which he never did. Even the girlfriend-man jumped and looked surprised.

Ellie stuck her head out, also looking surprised. Then she looked astonished, and came out with her hands covered in dough. “What are you doing here, our Very? Who’s this? What happened to Rosier?”

“Oh, I’m still Evan Rosier,” the thing said, smiling with sleepy sex-bomb amiability. It couldn’t possibly be Seth’s… thingy. He was not in that league. “I look like this because Spike’s mad at me.”

“I’m mad at you, too,” Seth told Ellie, looking as if he meant it.

“He’s mad at everybody,” the Rosier-thing concluded cheerfully.

“Well, _that’s_ not news,” Ellie said dryly. “Let me wash my hands.”

“ _Scourgify,”_ Seth snapped, flicking his stick at her, and the dough disappeared in a froth of clean white bubbles. They dissipated after a moment, leaving her hands completely dry.

“Severus Snape,” Ellie snapped, “this is a muggle house.”

Seth gave her a flat-eyed look.  He didn’t even flick his eyes pointedly to the kitchen, let alone insist out loud that it was a mixed house (when it wasn’t, with him living elsewhere), which Toby supposed was some improvement.

She folded her arms.  “You know better than to do magic in front of your father.”

“I will do,” Seth said levelly, “what I damned well please.”

“Yeah, but Spike,” the Rosier-thing said reasonably, “he’s the only person in the room you’re _not_ mad at.”

Seth considered this, as if it was an interesting problem in the crossword. Finally he said judiciously, “I’m always mad at him.” Then he turned to Toby and very graciously allowed, “But you appear sober with an absence of histamine flush, and haven’t been awful where I could see you at it so far today. Apologies.”

“Oh, ta,” Toby drawled.  The manipulative little git looked pleased (not in a snide way, for once), but Toby refused to feel good about that.  His drinking was his business, and Ellie’s, and nothing to do anymore with the infuriating ankle-biter who’d driven him to it. If he was off the bottle now, that was no one’s businesses but his and Eileen’s. It had nothing to do with a supercilious little sod who’d buggered off the moment he had another roof to live under and not shown his face again for years. He’d not be judged, for good or ill, by a haughty brat who’d never taken an interest in him, or anything wholesome, in the first place.

“My pleasure.”  Seth described a little bow with his hand, mouth twitching.   

Well, it was nice to be acknowledged, Toby supposed, and maybe Seth did have a right to check on who his mother was living with these days. He resolved to get Ellie to knit the lad a twelve-foot Tom Baker scarf for his next birthday, even if Seth would never wear it (though it might not look completely stupid with those frocks his lot wore) and probably wouldn’t even know what it was.

Toby resolved to get Ellie to knit him a twelve-foot Tom Baker scarf for his next birthday, even if the boy would never wear it (though it might not look completely stupid with those frocks his lot wore) and probably wouldn’t even know what it was.

“Now, what’s going on?” Ellie asked briskly. “I have to put the scones in or turn the oven off. Could make tea.”

“We didn’t finish lunch,” the Rosier-thing realized, its eyes going wide. They were a greenish sort of blue, Toby realized. The Evans girl had had green eyes. _And_ red hair. “I could send Linkin for—”

For the first time, Toby believed the person wasn’t just an elaborate joke at his expense, because of the way Seth tilted his head and smirked warmly at it. “You just supported Mam about no magic in front of Da, but you want to call in a _house elf?_ ” he asked. “Do you need a nap?”

“Yes, please,” the thing agreed promptly. “Anyway, I only did that so no one would die. Now, if your father moves to the armchair and you sit in the corner of the sofa…”

“Shut up,” Seth instructed it fondly, and thumbed lightly over its mouth. It bit his thumb, and he nearly-smiled but didn’t even shiver. _Dead_. “Mam, Evan will fill you in, and I will go into the kitchen and Not Do Magic In Front Of Da.”

Ellie sighed. Toby grunted and shrugged. The door was still on its hinges and no one was doing magic _on him;_ he wasn’t pushing his luck.

“Sooo,” Toby drew out, after a few awkward seconds, once the only person everyone knew had disappeared into the kitchen. “Does he often turn you into a girl?”

“Nope,” Rosier replied, turning a lazy smile on him. This one was not sexy. Or, at least, it was also sort of terrifying.

That got Toby’s back up. “Does _he_ often turn into a girl?”

The little smile curled more and got colder. “Exactly as often as he feels like it. As do I. Magic is fun that way. I understand if you’re jealous.”

That thought was so horrifying Toby choked. At least, he’d long since made his peace with of _course_ he was jealous of magic people, the sick, poncy, selfish bastards, hoarding their power for their own little ‘world’ when the _real_ world needed so much help. But the other thing, _ugh_.

“Oh, you’re just _curious,_ ” the thing went on, horribly understanding. “Well, I’m sorry, I’d be happy to tell you, _I_ wouldn’t mind, but I’m afraid Severus wouldn’t like it at all if I were to talk about what it’s like to be in bed with him.”

“Oh, dear god,” Toby blurted, appalled and staring at it and trying not to have any kind of imagination in any way whatsoever.

“Yes, I know,” it said, shaking its fiery head sadly. “It’s tragic, but there are some things he just won’t let me brag about. I can’t understand it.”

“I have asked you and asked you,” Ellie snarled between her teeth, “not to come here and to _leave my husband alone_.”

Huh. Toby made a note to ask her later when, exactly, she’d had the chance to ask him that. Assuming they survived the visit from two pissed-off wizards.

It turned to her, dropping the sickly faux-sorrow, and complained, “ _I_ didn’t come; Spike _dragged_ me. Look what he did to my shirt! I am never going to hear the _end_ of this from my tailor. I’d blame it on him because it is in fact his fault, but the man would just tell me I should know better than to let people grab me; I ask you!”

“You know,” Toby said dryly, “the fact you have a tailor loses you a whole hell of a lot of sympathy around here.”

“The fact that my Spike used to come to school trying to pretend he didn’t have any broken bones,” the thing returned cordially, its eyes glinting like Eileen’s horrible old spitting marbles, “forfeits you the entirety of my interest in your opinion.”

“ _Your_ parents left you to be raised in an empty house by a nanny-elf who habitually hit you with a spoon,” Seth yelled from the kitchen. Toby had flushed in fury (not all of which was directed at the rich spoiled brat who’d decided to come into his home to needle and judge him), but that image was enough to unclench his fists.  Even if he knew perfectly well that Seth had meant it to be. Eileen had told him enough about her parents’ house that he knew his mental picture was off, but he couldn’t move away from ‘Legolas in a Mary Poppins dress.’[1]

The Rosier thing jumped. “Did you put up a skrying thing in here?” it demanded, grinning incredulously. “My hair-tie, you put it on my hair-tie where I can’t see it, you sly thing.”

“Nooooooo,” Seth drawled, sounding as if he was refusing to smile. “But it’s been about two minutes since I left the room, and I know all of you.”

The thing laughed, and then glared at Toby with hands-off-my-girl eyes and hissed, “ _Mine._ ”

Toby shrugged and reached for his pipe. Disinterestedly, he said, “I suppose you’ll have to do till someone else comes along.” He didn’t really mean it. What he meant was _I’ll have to put up with you because there’s nothing I can do about it._ But if parents could do anything about who their children chose, Ellie would never have come to him; neither magic nor muscles had anything to do with it, really.

And he wasn’t going to go buy the pint he was aching for, so there was nothing left to do but be powerless and mean with it or lower the boy’s hackles a bit. Assuming he could hear Toby in the kitchen, which in Toby’s experience was a damned good assumption. ‘Two minutes since and I know you,’ his arse. Pure grandstanding, or near enough.

“No,” the thing insisted, glaring harder. “ _Mine_.”

“Evan, he’s more sod-off-Northern than I am, you have to translate,” Seth called. “Da, if there is any damned tobacco in evidence in any form when I come back in that room, I will not bother to use my wand; how many times do I have to tell you nicotine is, _yes,_ even in pipe form, _still,_ a carcinogenic insecticide?”

“Oh,” the Rosier thing said, appeased. “Well, I still want his intestines for a window-treatment, if you don’t.”

“That’s why he’s decided you’re all right.”   Pause. “For a given value of all right, taking into account that he doesn’t actually care.”

Not one word of this of this, Toby might have mentioned if the fantasy about his guts had not been, as well as specific and gorily unique, disturbingly queer, was within a football field of accurate. Seth really was the world champion of lying to himself, he thought sometimes. Even now Toby still held that getting drunk was healthier, saner, and smarter, though only comparatively and he wouldn’t have said so even to his mates, who’d have agreed if they even understood what he meant.

“Come again?”

“I’ll explain it to you later. I am _not fooling,_ Da, put it _away._ ”

Toby looked at his wife and pointed the pipe handle in the direction of Her Son, aggrieved. If she didn’t want Toby telling him not to do it, damn it, she had to. Looking almost as tired as she had the year the boy had been fifteen, she opened her mouth.

“I don’t need magic for that, Mam,” Seth pre-empted them without coming out of the kitchen. Toby could _hear_ him smirking. “I have ears and plenty of nose. Evan, will you kindly explain your insanity? I don’t want to go through all that again.”

“Right,” the thing said, stretching its long limbs down and out in Ellie’s armchair without so much as a by-your-leave. Ellie sat down next to Toby on the sofa, her mouth pinched. Luxuriously stretching fit to burst its buttons (Toby tried not to stare at where the shameless butterflies were fluttering), the thing said conversationally, “Severus was representing his project at a brewing convention in Dartmoor this week, d’you see, Mrs. Snape, and you’ll just never _guess_ who we ran into today!”

“Belike not,” she said sourly.

The thing beamed lethal sunlight at her and warbled, “Your _mother! Charming_ lady! _And_ her sister! Oh, I can’t _tell_ you how unprepared we were!”

Toby’s shoulders slammed up and tight. Ellie hunched a bit, too, but mostly she looked at the thing as though it was not merely weird and against nature but mental. “What would me Mam be doing in _Devon_?” she asked. “Or Aunt Augusta? The whole boiling of ‘em are Yorkshire.”

“Oddly enough, I didn't much care about that,” the Rosier thing yawned candidly, displaying a very pink tongue and unnaturally white teeth. “Before she recognized Severus she seemed to be looking into, er, yarn dying potions or some such sort of something. Then she did see him and she gasped GASP ELLIE and Spike worked out who she was and for some reason the subject was dropped. Couldn’t tell you why,” it drawled sardonically. “Just one of those things, I suppose.”

Toby snorted.

“Put it DOWN,” Seth yelled from the kitchen.

“I didn’t pick it UP,” he yelled back. “And it’s my damn house, boy, I’ll smoke if I like!”

“Not around virgin lungs that belong to ME, you won’t!”

The Rosier thing looked delighted. It also smirked just at the corner of its mouth, just for a second, as though Seth was either lying or wrong about its lungs.

“Disgusting,” Toby muttered, shaking his head. Ellie had taken his hand, because women were allowed to smile when their children were being sappy, and he didn’t shake it off.

It wasn’t lost on him that Seth had declined to point out, for once, that Ellie had put at least as much money into the house as he had, pouring all her savings into it so they could own it free and clear no matter what happened. And she’d gotten more in pocket money, before the boom had come down, than he’d made in a month. They’d laughed about that, once. Had cause to be glad of it later, too, when the mill burned down. Rubbing it in had been a favorite trick of the insufferable little prick’s when he’d been around thirteen, though: _it’s not your house, it’s more Mam’s than yours_.

This would have been bad enough if he’d only meant to get Toby’s goat by it. Ellie had kept telling him that was all it was, trying to soothe him, and Toby’d thought that was all she heard. He and Seth had both known, though, that Seth had been doing his damnedest to get Ellie to kick her husband out of ‘her’ house—at least during the summers, when Scotland kept spitting her son back into it, sulking and snarling if not actually kicking and screaming.

Seth was looking more as if he wanted to be elsewhere than as if he coveted the

“At any rate, we got to talking,” the thing said, “and at a certain point in the conversation, I realized that Severus has,” it shot Ellie a hard, bright smile that was in the truth of it an intensely nasty glare, “not the first idea in the world what it means to get married.” It seemed to use the moment where it was getting stared at with raised eyebrows to reconsider, and explained to Toby, “That is, what it means to us. He obviously has a very clear idea, and I assume it’s based on,” it waved a vague hand, “you, and he’s got it _completely up his jumper_. This is a problem for me and,” it returned the bright, pleasant drill of a smile to Ellie’s face, “you’re going to fix it.”

Ellie got her pinch-mouthed look that meant she was deciding if she should take offense. Toby could have helped her there: the answer was yes.

Seth came in at that point carrying a tray of scones with the teapot and cups on it. Toby could smell tea, but also eggnog. He peered in the teapot once it was on the table: tea, and smelled like tea. He looked at Seth suspiciously.

Seth tossed a scone right in his face. Eggnog.

“That’s not right,” Toby said.

“Very, don’t _throw things at people,_ ” Ellie gritted.

“He’s a Chaser, of course he’s going to throw things at people,” the Rosier thing said in a reasonable tone that Toby already hated after hearing it now for the second time.

“Right, don’t throw things at people,” Toby nodded. “That’s not right, either.” Seth rolled his eyes. “And don’t you roll your eyes at me.”

“They do it on their own when people are foolish, close-minded, unreasonably pig-headed against their own interests, and/or Philistines,” Seth said in treacly mock-meek non-apology. “It’s beyond my control.” Toby was going to agree that it obviously was or it would have been beaten out of him years ago (not just by Toby by any stretch of the imagination), but he picked up the teapot and held it threateningly over the Rosier-thing’s lap. “Move.”

“Lad, you are _rude,_ ” Toby sighed. Someone had to say it, although he’d so completely failed that there was nothing to be done at this point.

The thing just frowned, though, as though Seth wasn’t threatening it but had merely made an uncharacteristic error, possibly because he was tired. It was that kind of frown: just a little concerned. “Spike, _they’re_ on the sofa.”

“And you’re sprawling all over my mother’s armchair like a potsticker, the armchair _my mother_ always sits in, and it’s sticking festering splinters into my brain. Move.”

The thing eyed him, now in pain. Unsurprised, resigned, why-is-this-my-life pain. So they’d definitely known each other a while. “Can you possibly mean a wanton?”

Seth’s eyed glinted. He looked pleased with the thing, or possibly himself. Not-sullen was such an unusual look on him that Toby had trouble with the details. Then he shifted a squinty glare in Toby’s direction and explained to the thing crossly, “Thank you; I was trying not to give _him_ more ideas than your idiotic waistcoat is already. _Move_.”

The thing heaved a great, dramatic sigh and shimmered to its feet, rolling its shoulders up to crack its knuckles over its head. Toby looked away hastily, but Eileen’s nails met in his arm anyway.

Contrary to expectation (or, as usual, just contrary), Seth did not sit in Ellie’s just-vacated armchair; he sat in the guest one by the quiet fireplace. The Rosier-thing plonked right down in his lap, hooking one leg over the arm of the chair like an unquestionable potsticker and twining an arm around Seth’s neck. At least Seth’s stringy hippie-hair was pulled back today. And now it was his turn for the why-is-this-my-life look, so that was a bright spot in Toby’s decade.

The thing craned to give Seth an eyebrow he couldn’t ignore, clearly telling him _You didn’t sit in the armchair you told me not to sit in._ Seth sneered at it, but both his arms had locked around its waist, fingers interlaced with white knuckles, so Toby had a headache.

He peered at the scone Seth had pitched at him, and asked suspiciously, “Is there anything funny about these?”

Seth pursed his lips, considering. “The nutmeg wasn’t cooking-grade,” he said. “Pre-grated; not fresh.”

“Since when do we have nutmeg?” Toby demanded, passing over the jaw-dropping snobbery in favor of turning to his wife. She’d have mentioned it if anyone had bartered her some for one of those little jobs she did for people. Spices were dear.

“We don’t.”

“Why the hell do you carry nutmeg around?” he demanded, turning back to Seth.

The lad didn’t exactly roll his eyes this time—rolling was a fast motion—but they went so far up that all Toby could see was the whites the entire time Seth was snort-sighing at him. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to. I also added some decent vanilla; you’re welcome; do you want to know why I have that?”

“I want to know why you mucked about with my recipe,” Ellie said sharply.

“‘Decent’ vanilla?” Toby asked. Vanilla was vanilla, wasn’t it?

“Because it was cardboard,” Seth answered Ellie as though he hadn’t even spoken. Toby gritted his teeth, and did not take any tea because tea was not what he wanted. Not that he gave a damn about vanilla; it was the principle. “You knew I was going to, and if you hadn’t wanted me to you shouldn’t have left me alone in the kitchen. But you did want me to because I’m the only person in this house who was raised in a kitchen, without an elf, and has a proper feel for cooking, and you know it, and from the proportions of that recipe you’re cooking for the knitting coven. ”

“ _Sewing circle._ ”

“Right.  And on the subject of how I was raised, you were going to answer Evan’s question.”

“It was more of an injunction,” the thing corrected him amiably. He let go of its waist just long enough to make a dismissive _whatever_ gesture with his fingers. “I’d like a scone, please.”

“Well, I can’t get you one if we’re not using magic; you’re sitting on me.”

“Yes, I _am,_ ” the thing gloated. Toby was sure it didn’t even want a scone; it had just wanted to make Seth say that out loud. Evidently realizing this, too, Seth sighed. It snuggled into his neck as if it had never even heard of words like ‘dignity,’ ‘decorum,’ or ‘scone.’

“He actually has quite good manners when he’s not actively trying to give you a middle-class-mores induced stroke,” Seth told him and Ellie lamely. One of his hands had migrated to splay over the back of the things neck, his sun-starved fingers curling out from under its low-slung red-gold ponytail.

Toby raised an eyebrow. “You told —er, your friends we’re middle-class?” he drawled, avoiding the murky pronouns confusion just in time.

They were doing better these days, though, with only two to feed and none of the money being pissed away or hoarded for lizard eyes and god knew what. Word had gotten ‘round the neighboring towns about Eileen, and Toby was quite looking forward to Seth’s face when Toby told him he was working at the new library now. Nothing fancy, just putting the books on the shelves and driving the van over to trade books with other libraries sometimes, but it was a job, and no one ribbed him for leafing through the product on his breaks, and the bit with the van saved him with his old mates. He couldn’t think of it as real work in the same way working the mill had been, and it might not have been much better than the dole for the money, but it sure as hell felt better. Food was tasting better, these days, even if El didn’t do freakish things with poncy spices.

“No, but I told you, everyone in my House at school is either the equivalent of titled, stupidly rich, or damned close,” Seth sighed.

Eileen gave him a pinched, disapproving look for talking baldly about money, but Toby was resigned to this sort of thing. He was quite sure that, if Seth hadn’t essentially gone to school out on another planet with alien nobs for friends, the young idiot would have joined the CPGB[2] for the express purpose of telling them they needed to get off their arses and make a practical study of French history.

“Evan’s family’s both. He can understand privation, but—no, honestly. Wealth doesn’t stop you going without things you need, just the things you need to live.”

“I’m a very happy person,” the thing said drowsily.

“Yes,” Seth said, giving its waist a squeeze, “and when you aren’t, you don’t go looking for other miserable people to complain with about whose fault it is. So you don’t know what a place can get like when everyone in it is hurting and miserable and hungry, and puts all their energy into a public face that says everything’s fine and respectable and well-scrubbed and stiff-upper-lip, then spends half their off-time complaining and wallowing and the rest taking the misery out on anyone who doesn’t get out of the way, just hoping they’ll be up for giving you a good, satisfying fight to get it out of your system for a while.”

Toby hadn’t finished gaping in outrage—it was one thing to want to get out and make something of yourself, and quite another to rip all the covers off your home ground for someone who’d never understand anything—before the thing sat up and looked at Seth seriously. “You didn’t complain and you never took it out on the kids,” it told him intently.

“I think they might disagree, and I didn’t complain to you or Narcissa because you would have had them killed or worse if you thought I couldn’t handle them myself,” he said dryly, explaining, “Those bullies,” to Toby and Ellie as an aside. “I complained to people who I thought might help without going overboard.”

“That was optimistic of you,” the thing remarked drolly.

Seth looked mostly rueful, but a bit as though he wanted to stick out his tongue. “ _But,_ ” he said firmly,“I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about you, trying to shock a man whose mother worked the music halls because you can’t tell the difference between a regular sod and a fussy low-wage Ministry inherited-desk jockey with a waxed beard and a reputation to protect.”

“Fail?” it asked Seth sadly.

“Fail,” he agreed, running a commiserating hand down its cheek. Ellie kept saying he worked with his hands like a man should, but Toby didn’t see any callouses. “Doomed from the outset.”

It sighed, and curled in again, announcing, “Eh. I’m comfortable.”

Seth rolled his eyes _and_ shook his head, but Toby didn’t think he looked displeased. “Good for you, Majesty.”

“Thank you, Highness. And speaking of Princes.” The thing turned a cool look on Ellie. “Please proceed, madam.”

Ellie glanced at Toby, but he wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. She looked fidgety, uneasy. “Very… you know why things were bad for a while. It wasn’t just between your father and me.”

“Yeeees?” Seth drew out, eyeing her in that special way he had that made the gentlest vicars want to slap him. It was that voice of his, too, that said he suspected you were wasting his time and you had better prove him wrong or he would find a way to make you pay no matter how much bigger you were.

“I mean…” she looked at Toby again.

He still didn’t know what she wanted, but he took a stab at it. “You said it yourself; things were hard all around.”

“But it was the times,” she said, squeezing his hand.

“It wasn’t the times,” Seth said flatly, and pointed at Toby. “It was _he_ couldn’t stand a woman and a child could do things he couldn’t.”

“It was _that attitude,_ ” Toby growled, stung. “Making everything simple enough to sneer at.”

“Who, _Spike?_ ” the Rosier thing sat up to gape. “Encyclopaedia Byzantium?”

“I’m not that bad!”

“Look at my face, Spike.”

“I’m _not!”_

“I would laugh at you, but I’d just never _stop_.”

“What I mean is,” Ellie said very loudly, scowling at everyone, “it’s not always like that. It’s not like that for us now, Very.”

Seth looked at her with a flash of hurt.

She met him unwavering, shrugging a little. “You and your father just aren’t two people who should live with each other, and trying to make you wasn’t good for me.”

“Talk about making things simple,” Seth muttered.

“But it’s true. And things _were_ hard, and I never had anyone to help me. It was years when I came here before I had friends, and then, well, they all looked to me, I couldn’t let them see I couldn’t handle—”

“Oh, is _that_ where you get it,” the Rosier thing interrupted in disgust. “ _Gryffs_.”

Ellie looked at it with dislike, but she just went on talking to Seth. “But lots of people get married and are,” she shrugged, “reasonably happy most of the time.”

“Yeeeesss,” he asked again, eyebrow back up. She gave him a there-you-are look. “I know that,” he said in his if-you-think-I’m-stupid-you’re-stupid voice.

“Well, there you are,” she told the Rosier thing crossly.

It looked at her with condescending patience dripping out of its face. “That’s not the problem, Mrs. Snape,” it said with even more patience. “It’s not marriage he doesn’t understand, it’s _marriages._ Weddings. _Handfastings._ ”

“…Oh,” Ellie said. For the first time, she looked as if she understood—and understood that she had, in fact, done something wrong. Toby wished they had one of those instant cameras, so he could take a picture for posterity.

Then her face twisted into incredulity and she looked more like herself. Scowling at Seth, she demanded, “You’re angry because I never talked to you about weddings? Did you want a hope chest?”

Seth shot her a snippy look (which, Toby could admit since he wasn’t in the line of fire, was only fair), but his voice was level. “No, that’s why Evan’s up in arms. I don’t care about that, and he shouldn’t either.”

The thing looked dangerous again.

Even though Seth couldn’t see its face, he told it, “Not now.” Back to his mother, jaw set, “No. I, you see, have just found out that your father’s nickname is Verus—or, at least, that he wants it to be.”

Her head went back. “And _that’s_ why you’re all storms and vinegar?” she demanded.

Toby decided not to point out that Seth was, for Seth, being pudding and pie. It wouldn’t do him any favors with anyone, and would, if he knew his boy, make him revert to type. Even with a lapful of spoiled sexpot petting him.

“‘And that’s why you’re all storms and vinegar… _Very,_ ’” Seth finished for her pointedly.

The boy looked seriously annoyed, but not so angry Toby was worried. He thought the odds were pretty good, if that was the face Seth was making, that nothing really humiliating had been done to the scones.

The first bite told him that no, they wouldn’t have been drugged: this was one of the lad’s _special_ revenges. There wouldn’t be potions in there, either, and probably not even any delightful little tasteless digestion-disrupting herbs (Seth was probably too old for that sort of prank, now, anyway. Probably). Seth just wanted him to have to live with the knowledge that his son was a better cook than his wife, and he’d missed out on the chance to reap any benefits out of the shame of it.

The boy had always been a big believer in delicately inserting straws into camels’ backpacks, preferably after waving to get your attention and with a really snotty sneer on.

Toby wanted a drink. He took another scone.

Seth eyed him, unreadable, calculating, and looked at Ellie again. “I quite understand your making him my namesake formally,” he told her, voice twanging with irritation and distaste. “A very traditional piece of sucking-up, flattering and all that assuming he considered a half-blood infant a human child at all—”

“And it suits you,” the Rosier-thing said sleepily.

“I might not have suited it, if I hadn’t been given a name guaranteed to get me beaten up on a regular basis from the age of _five_ , but that’s beside the point,” Seth crabbed.

“You have a normal name, our Seth,” Toby pointed out, proud of himself for not telling the lad, _no, you were born like that_. It would have taken him all afternoon (because of the inevitable explosion) to explain he meant Seth was born an awkwardly-eager dreamer and a bookworm, and therefore with a target on his forehead, especially once he decided to be best friends with girls, not that the boy had always been sour.

He hadn’t, which still hurt with hot, stinking bubbles of guilt to think about, but he _had_ been born a bully-magnet. Toby had never been more relieved in his life than when the boy’s patience had broken and he’d shown everyone he was also a tooth-and-nails, knee-and-skull fighter who’d slash or stab anyone who really cornered him with his house key or the pencil they’d just broken for him. “You used it at school, before you went to that fancy-pants one.”

“They insisted on using my full birth-certificate name every time I got an award,” he complained.

 _Shouldn’t have swotted so much, then,_ Toby didn’t say, _or at least not let on._ He had been proud, really, despite all the trouble that being both worlds away the brightest kid in class and a smart-arse more impatient than clownish guaranteed a short and skinny boy who thought football was the stupidest waste of time on the face of the planet.

Toby had laughed his arse off when Seth wrote home snarling about having to join the sort-of-broom-footie team because his idiot friends were going to get themselves killed, and even more when he came home with books that showed he’d finally worked out the beautiful game (or at least the pie-in-the-sky one) was about tactics.Local lads had been right surprised, too, once the boy had managed to stop using his hands.

“Said it was,” Seth sneered, “distinguished.”

“Parts of it are,” the Rosier-thing said blandly. Toby glared at it—although so did Eileen, so that made him feel better.

“But that’s beside the point. The point is, being named after him formally had a goal. I do not, for the record, like it, but I do understand, and can tolerate it. But I fail to see the value in then also naming me after him informally! This is not a connection to be desired, I cannot help but feel—nauseated.” He tried to fold his arms and glare, but his so-called girlfriend-thing was in the way.

Toby snorted as Ellie stared at Seth as though he’d grown another head. “Your mother doesn’t call you that because of _him,_ you histrionic conclusion-leaper that you are,” he told the boy. “She calls you that because you’re _loud_.”

Seth blinked, and the thing conceded, “Actually, Spike, this may be starting to sound reasonable. You do have quite a pair of lungs, when you aren’t sitting on them.”

“I did think it was funny when Toby pointed out it fitted in your name,” Ellie admitted, and the Rosier-thing looked sharply and consideringly at Toby, who was glad he was sitting so instinctively backing away wouldn’t work. He looked back pugnaciously with his chin out instead. The thing didn’t look intimidated in the least, but it did seem taken aback, and glanced between Toby and Seth as if something was making it unhappy.  Seth looked offended.  There was probably, it occurred to Toby, a game of arrers going on at the pub right now.

“But he’s right,” Eileen told Seth, all the looks passing her by.  “When you were very little, I thought you must be the loudest crier in Lancashire, and the happiest, sweetest baby when you were happy—though I found out later every mother thinks that. And then,” she made a helpless gesture, which for some reason made a sea-blue eye twitch. “when you got a bit older, if I asked you to do, oh, wash the carrots or pick some berries or help one of the ladies wind their yarn, it was as if nothing else existed. And when you had a book, once you could read. The way you just looked at everything.”

“It’s the eyes,” Toby said, automatically reaching for his pipe. Seth glared at him. He glared back but stopped, not wanting another pipe broken in half in his mouth from across the room. “They just _look_ intense.”

“No, they really are,” the Rosier thing said, with a very _particular_ kind of smugness. Toby badly, badly wanted a drink.

 

 

“And the tantrums,” he reminded Ellie.

She winced, but told him, “All children have tantrums.”

“Loud, though.”

“They were that,” she conceded. Turning back to Seth, “And you were so… moody?” she asked Toby.

“Boy’s moody now,” Toby said. “Back then he was just temperamental.”

She shrugged, and told Seth, “You didn’t have good days or bad days, you had minutes. You’d be in love with someone’s cat and then snarling at everyone because you’d stubbed a toe and then tugging at my hand and staring at a sunset like you wanted to bottle it. No one could keep up. So when people asked me, ‘And how’s this young man today,’ I started telling them, ‘You know our lad, he’s very _very_.”

Seth had been looking taken aback, but now he said, “Wait a minute. I _remember_ that. That wasn’t because my foot hurt, that was because Will Callum laughed at me for tripping.”

Eileen’s shoulders slumped, and she rubbed her eyes. “You were _four,_ ” she sighed. More to God or the universe at large, Toby thought, than to Seth.

“I never got him back for that one,” Seth mused.

“No,” the Rosier thing told him, not unsympathetically and giving the back of his hand a comforting rub.

“No?” Seth asked. To Toby’s astonishment, this seemed to be a serious question, without even any outrage, let alone challenge.

“Fly-swatting, Spike,” the thing smiled, leaning into him. “Delegate it to karma; you have more pressing things on your schedule.”

“ _Quite_ true,” Seth agreed feelingly.

Toby revised his opinion slightly. The thing was still unnatural, sneakily hostile, and disgustingly nobby. Not even in the formal, distant and condescending but polite way that got everyone’s back up but had to be borne: in the I-saw-it-therefore-it’s-mine-now-to-use-as-I-like way. It did seem, however, to be capable of using its powers for good.

“And we all have something else on our _mutual_ schedule today,” the thing smiled at everyone like a placid anvil, solid and not going anywhere.

“There’s really no need for that,” Seth said.

Toby hadn’t heard that voice on him before, but he recognized it: it was 100% Eileen. It was her _we have been through this so many times I am no longer even annoyed by the fact that you’ve brought it up AGAIN even though it makes me so upset I can’t even express myself, you are making me so tired, just STOP_ voice. Since the thing had probably just saved the life of the promising young son of a friend (though they didn’t see each other so often, now Toby was staying out of the pub), he tried to shoot it a friendly warning look.

It wasn’t interested in him, though. It had squirmed around to look Seth full in the face. It wasn’t glaring and still looked perfectly pleasant, but Toby didn’t think Seth was going to win this one. “There really is,” it said.

“Wrong.”

“Maybe you’ll be more honest in front of your parents,” the thing speculated.

Toby uttered, “Ha.”

“Please explain, _honestly_ , what your problem is.”

“Legion,” Toby said promptly. Ellie gave him a Look as Seth shot hot, nasty sparks at him (not real ones, miraculously), and he shrugged. “God’s truth, El.”

“It seems to me,” Seth said to his thing in a strained keeping-his-temper voice, “that there’s only you making up a problem to trouble yourself with. In this area, I have no problems at all except when you go insane and start on _this_.”

The thing softened, said, “Well, that’s good,” and kissed him warmly. Toby looked in entreaty at Ellie, but she leveled him the _you two are on your own now he’s grown, I am NEVER IN THE MIDDLE AGAIN_ stare. Which always made him slink away with his tail between his legs, because it was more than fair.

Then the thing pulled back, an amiable steel hourglass, and said firmly, “Then I’ll rephrase. What is your _objection_? You have no intention of leaving me.”

Toby thought it meant that for a firm, confident statement, but the self-assurance slipped a little at the end. He put a third mental check in column B, though it still looked sad and not-even-trying next to the colossus of Column Dear God Please No.

“Don’t be stupid,” Seth said scornfully.

“Ever?” The thing did, Toby noted sourly, a quite good Last Puppy In The Shop.

“Look at your damn arm and stop trying to embarrass me in front of people who will observe my humiliation with such ‘proud’ schadenfreude they will then go tell all the neighbors.”

This had been said with brisk irritation and an expression that suggested Seth was immune to big blue eyes, right enough. However, Toby could not think of any other bloke anywhere near Seth’s age he’d ever met in his life who wouldn’t have at least twitched nervously at the idea of _always,_ let alone completely failed to backpedal, panic, or tell a girl(ish)friend not to jump the gun _._ For the thousandth time, he wondered how much simpler and easier his life would have been, even with the work going away, if the boy had just been born a girl (they would have called her Claudia May, and tried not to tell her why May).

Probably Seth’s life, too. Though Ellie said girls could be bullies and otherwise horrible in their own way, and Toby couldn’t imagine Seth would have made a very pretty girl. Or graceful, or charming, or well-liked, or popular with the boys. So maybe it would have been about the same, for him.

But at worst Toby’s child would have been a tomboy, not a complete nance. At least he wasn’t swish and was, despite Toby’s initial feelings about those ‘robes’ before the Evans girl had reminded him what her own reasonably normal da wore to work (at least wizards didn’t have to wear wigs), only a _drama_ queen.

“You’re so romantic,” the thing drawled, but it was caressing its left arm through its sleeve and looked reassured. Toby didn’t want to know, he didn’t want to know, he… yes he did.

“That’s what evil gets you,” Seth said with awful brightness.

“Well?”

“You ask as though I haven’t been honest in the past. I have. We require no formalities, I wouldn’t find a ceremony earth-shatteringly meaningful and I find it difficult to believe you would, either, and even if I enjoyed parties generally the idea of what your mother would do with one she could designate a Significant Occasion fills me with dread and nausea.”

“Uh-uh,” the thing shook its head, crossing its arms and sitting back.

“I don’t think we should be here,” Eileen murmured.

“Our damn living room,” Toby shrugged, and bit into another scone. She glared at him. The scones were, as Seth had guessed, supposed to have been for her sewing-and-knitting circle. He did not, however, want any of what was going to happen after her friends asked her for the recipe to happen, like her telling them it was his son’s recipe. And them then asking after Seth and her telling them about any of this. So it was in his best interest to eat as many as possible, even if that puffed the boy’s head up.

Seth had lifted his eyebrows, and the thing said, “I’ve been asking you practically since we left school, so I should think you realize it’s important to me. If this was just a matter of ‘It’s unnecessary and doesn’t sound like a fun afternoon,’ we’d have done it a long time ago. Uh-uh, nope, you have a _problem._ ”

Seth’s lips thinned. He was struggling with himself. It was almost the face he made when he was deciding whether to say something that was definitely going to get him backhanded, only not angry. Finally he made that odd _sod it, I’m saying it_ shape with his mouth, blew air out of his teeth, and said in a level voice, “No, I don’t. But you would.”

The thing gave a sharp little movement of its head, disappointed in him. “Rats,” it mourned. “And here I wanted to do this in front of your parents—”

“Yes, why did you decide to force this in front of _my parents_?” Seth demanded silkily.

“ _Specifically_ ,” the thing scolded, rubbing Seth’s wrist, “so you wouldn’t DF at me.”  Seth flung up his hands and silently supplicated the ceiling.

“DF?” Toby asked. He felt he’d just been brought into the conversation, in a way. It might not be particularly safe to cooperate, but what the hell.

“When he feels I’m being insufficiently arrogant-I-mean-confident, he calls me names,” Seth said drily.

“When I notice him displaying all the ego integrity of a pile of diced flobberworms,” the Rosier thing corrected, sweet and sharp, “I bring it to his attention. This happens an average of twelve times a week and I blame you.”

Eileen shot him a _you two idiots always have to take the bait, don’t you_ look. So he took some tea instead.

“I’ve read that substituting something else for a destructive addiction works better than just stopping,” Seth commented, watching him drink. Toby almost got angry, but the boy just looked interested. “Is that what you did?”

“No,” Toby said, “and you’re not using me as a decoy, thanks.”

Seth smirked at him. “Sure? Pick up a point or two?”

“You wouldn’t give me points if you were sticking ‘em in with a pin. I’m just drinking me tea, me. You two have at it.”

Seth shrugged philosophically and turned back to his thingy. Didn’t even go a frustrated red, let alone a mortally offended white. In fact, he had that almost-friendly pleased look again. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could make your mates understand, when they started bragging about their boys manning up and getting married to the girls they’d got up the duff or winning praise at work, but Toby nearly choked on his tea.

“What I’m being,” Seth said intently, “is realistic. As a flatmate I’m not now a drag on your career, and probably wouldn’t be even if it got out widely that you were, er…”

“If you say slumming I’m going to knee you where you can’t get me back right now,” Rosier warned with a fixed, pleasant smile. Column B, check. Hell, give it two.

“ _Consorting_ with a half-blood, happy?” Seth snapped.

“No, I’m not, you overprotective— _my mother_ is getting impatient with you, Spike! Read, she is not against it! Callisto _Black-_ Rosier!”

“Yes, well, she also thinks one of us is going to give her grandchildren, and _that’s_ not happening.”

Toby didn’t know whether to be deeply disappointed that he wasn’t ever going to be a granddad, either, or fall on his knees to thank God right then and there. He was leaning towards the latter.

“Er, _no,_ ” Rosier agreed, shuddering. “She can take a fertility potion and do it herself, as far as I’m concerned.”

Seth looked amused. “And you’ll be telling her this when, keeping in mind it took your own grandmother an imperius, an elf, and a club with nails in to procure you?”

“Thirty-second of Never,” the thing said promptly. Toby would have boxed Seth’s ears and _hard_ if he’d been able to reach him, and Ellie looked like she was thinking the same, but the thing didn’t seem to resent being told his parents hadn’t wanted him. “But you take my point?”

“Your mother and Narcissa are _wrong,_ ” Seth told him, very low. “They’ve been princesses all their lives and they haven’t the least idea what it’s like to be in the mud. Neither do you. They just don’t get jeered at or shunned. I was born with the doors all closed; I’ve had to kick them open, which is satisfying, or slide in on other people’s coattails, which is infuriating. I expect Mam could tell you what it’s like to have them all slam in your face when they’d been wide open.”

“I don’t exactly recommend the experience,” Ellie allowed dryly. “But it’s survivable, and I think you’re being a bit dramatic, Severus.”

“Really,” Seth said coldly.

“Oh, not about me, or you so far,” she allowed. “But—no offense, Toby; I’m speaking of how those nobby wazzocks see it—you’re not your father. A half-blood’s not a muggle, wasn’t even when I was a girl. And you’re not what you were when you went to school, our Very. Doing all right, aren’t you? Maybe you don’t live on your interest,” she slapped Toby’s leg for sneering, “but you could get just about any brewing or apothecary job you set your mind to, you know you could. Your young man works, too, so it’s not as if he’d be making a complete mismatch with nothing in common between you. And you know people now.”

“And not just the family, either,” Rosier said hastily. “Our neighbors are on the rise in the Ministry, even if you don’t see it, and they think you’re all right.”

“They think I’m funny,” Seth said sourly.

“You are funny,” Rosier agreed, smiling. “Especially when you do that thing in the kitchen or rip apart the WWN people. Then Slughorn’s been much more impressed with you, lately, and there’s Belby and, er, that nice, er, young lady you met at the convention. _There’s_ a connection, if you like. And you’ve got some recognition around MESoP, now, even if you, er, mostly haven’t exactly been making _friends…”_

“Hacks and quacks,” Seth sneered.

Rosier rolled its eyes, but didn’t argue. “And you said a few days ago you’d had a charmsmithing jam with Professor Flitwick, who’s weirdly big in the charmsmithing community for someone who doesn’t publish much, as well as the larger enchanting one, of course, what with everyone having loved his class since yonks.”   It grinned. “And that delightful Miss Umbridge was _terribly_ impressed with you, I’m sure you’ve got an in there.”

“ _Ugh!”_ Seth protested. “That woman is poisonous!”

“But she’s going far, she’s so insinuating and treacly. She’ll make someone with the sensitivity of a brick, who can therefore tolerate the campaign process, a perfect toady and stage-mother, you watch,” Rosier predicted.

“Thank you, Professor Slughorn.”

Rosier made a face at him. “My point is your mother is perfectly right. You may not be what the Sacred Twenty-Eight would call a ‘brilliant match’ on paper, but you’re nowhere near a millstone anymore even to them. And, you realize, some society witch like Cissa might want to stop me painting. Some of them think work is work, you know.”

“It is, and it’s good for your soul. Getting up before noon would be, as well.”

“See? You’re not a millstone, you’re a goad, is what you are. Anyway, I do get up before noon. Quite often.” Seth failed to bite down a smirk, and Rosier touched his face, serious. “Even if people believed all those rumors my idiot cousin put about, which I _know_ is what you’re thinking, and they don’t. I took care of that _years_ ago.”

“…How?”

“Never you mind. You get plausible deniability for your birthday sometimes, too.”

Seth looked rather charmed, alongside the intense curiosity.

Rosier leveled another immovable look on him. “But. Severus.   Even if you were a millstone, _that’s my lookout. You don’t get to decide that for me_.”

“I get to decide I’ve lived what resentment in a trap does over time and decide I don’t want any more,” Seth said stonily. Toby fidgeted, hands twitching around the glass that wasn’t in them. He would have settled for his pipe. Eileen coughed, and he saw her eyes slide longingly to her kitchen. He tentatively shifted a little closer, and she let him.

Rosier cupped his face in its hands. “Look at me,” it demanded. Reluctantly, Seth did. “Don’t. Be. Stupid.”

Eventually, Seth’s face softened a little, but only above the nose. “Hypothetically conceding that for the sake of the argument,” he began stubbornly.

“That means I win,” Rosier informed Eileen and Toby cheerfully.

“We know,” they wearily chorused. It grinned at them.

Seth glared at everybody. “ _Hypothetically_ conceding that _for the sake of the argument,_ ” he repeated. He made a horrible scrunched up face when Rosier leaned in to nuzzle his nose, but consented to be kissed. Impatiently. _Dead_. “Putting that aside for the moment,” he tried again.

“By which you mean forever, because I win,” Rosier smiled into his face.

Seth glared at him. “ _For the moment,_ ” he repeated, “We’ve discussed my misgivings about,” he glanced warily at Toby and Eileen, “the current direction of the political zeitgeist, and… er, associated things. At the moment, you and I are known, as a matter of public record, to be able to tolerate each other well enough to live together, and it wouldn’t be terribly difficult for a determined investigator to find out that we’re either friendly or long-term allies. That already makes us vulnerable. I _don’t_ like the idea of its being a matter of public record that we’re each other’s natural primary hostages, and powerful ones.”

“Is he being melodramatic again?” Toby asked Eileen.

“Er… not terribly, actually,” Rosier said, sitting back on Seth’s lap again, thoughtful.

Toby stared at them. “Hostages like… he could get kidnapped because you’re a nob?” he tried to understand.

“What did I do?” Rosier asked, looking mildly offended.

Seth rolled his eyes.  He told it,  “Nob without a  ‘k.’” That took Toby a second, and then he grabbed a scone barely in time to bury a snort into it. It would only make the lad insufferable.

“Oh. In that case, I’d pity the kidnappers,” Rosier mused, smiling sleepily, “and pay for the pensieve.”

“He means the footage,” Seth told Toby. “Who knows. It needn’t be something so dramatic as kidnapping, but I shouldn’t like to be used to influence Evan or his family in other ways, or have anyone think mine could be used to do so.”

“Or the reverse,” Evan suggested.

Seth looked at him with a pitying that-ship’s-sailed expression. What he said was, “Your domestic-family-unit is self-protected and already known have ties to your larger Houses, as is your family-of-origin, but you as an individual are more vulnerable. Most of what’s left to control is how useful anyone might think it would be to hurt you. Which they would very nearly have to do physically, you realize; your scales are entirely functional.”

Toby wasn’t quite sure what Seth meant by ‘scales,’ but Rosier frowned as if he thought Seth to be slathering on an over-the-top compliment to distract him from something deeply worrying.

The boy turned back to Toby and elaborated, “The wizarding government is completely useless, the newspaper has a monopoly and no spine, and the powerful families can get away with practically anything if they bribe the right people. It’s not fairyland, and there’s a coalition making a power play that, well, there’ve been some worrying events and there are rumors that this coalition might be behind them.”

“I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you to keep your fool head down,” Toby posited sourly.

Seth gave him an equally-sour twist of a smile and whistled a couple of bars of _Two Lovely Black Eyes_. “Oh, I’m right cautious, as Princes go,” he said sardonically. “Apparently.” Eileen groaned and buried her face in her hands. Toby resolved to ask later.

“All right,” Rosier said, still thoughtfully. “You did have a point, that last one. Suppose we agree to call it a problem not to be left unsolved by the time any other practical arrangements are made. Are we set then?

“I was set from the beginning,” Seth said crossly. No, mulishly. Huh. Toby nudged Eileen and chin-pointed at him as Rosier made a strangled exasperation noise.

Ellie watched Rosier batter itself against an increasingly set-jawed, hot-eyed Seth for a while, and then cut into the squabble. “Severus Octavian Snape, this is your mother talking,” she rapped out.

They looked at her, Rosier frustrated and curious, Seth hunched like a defensive vulture. He always did get smart too late. He ought to have been counting his blessings though; three names out of five wasn’t the worst trouble he could have been in.

“You’re old enough to ruin your life any way you choose,” she snapped, “but I won’t have you skulking about in my house hiding under your hair trying to avoid a fight when there’s one in your face and on your lap! And _you!_ You come in here and the first thing you say is ‘I look like this because he’s mad at me,’ and you’re content to just let him _be_ angry and slither out of finding out why—”

“Oi, House slur,” Rosier protested.

“ _If the yellow-livered scales fit make shoes out of ‘em,”_ she snapped, and turned back to Seth. “And _you,_ you give _him_ Amborella potion—”

Toby was disturbed that she knew what it was called.

“—But, what, you expect him to read your mind and just _know_? How many times have you gone ‘round the houses with me? You know men _never just know!_ ”

“But the scales do fit,” Seth protested lamely. “Slytherins read subtlety. Apart from having all the ambition of an elderly, postprandial lapdog, Evan’s the most Slytherin Slytherin I’ve ever _met_.”

“Except Narcissa,” Rosier filled in helpfully.

“No.”

Rosier utterly melted. It was disgusting, Toby told himself severely. Even a real girl oughtn’t to behave like that in company. Not even a _Southern_ girl.

“Still a man!” Ellie barked. “Now, I’m no fan of your lad’s, as you know, but it’s wrong to torment dumb animals.”

“…Spike, I don’t think she’s scared of me anymore.”

Ellie rammed Toby in the ribs with her elbow for snorting. “So are you torturing him on purpose?”

“No!” Seth snapped.

“Playing hard to get?”

“For fuck’s sake, _no_.”

“ _Language!_ Are you just being a stubborn clot-brained jackass on the rag for the pure pleasure of it, then?”

“Mam!”

Ellie flung up her hands in utter exasperation. “Then in Merlin’s name, stop mithering about and _tell the fool what he did!”_ Toby blinked. She hadn’t sworn like that almost since they were married.

“It’s just a bit irritating,” Seth snarled back, his voice rising, “to be continually asked to do something one has ALREADY DONE!”

“There it is,” Rosier said softly, after a moment, into the ringing silence. “Was I obliviated?”

“NO!”

“When did this happen, then, remind me?”

“WHEN I MOVED IN WITH YOU! When I AGREED to! SEVENTY-SEVEN!”

“He didn’t graduate ‘till ’78, did he?” Toby whispered to Eileen. She shook her head, eye and forehead twitching. “Did you know about this?”

“He said summer had gone well enough they might take a flat after school if no one changed his mind, that’s all.”

Rosier was also giving Seth an odd look. “Er… really not the same thing, Spike.”

Seth glared at it. “I beg your pardon, have we MET? Who in this WORLD do you think I would agree to live with? Let alone accept the terms of that stupid, STUPID rent bet? Did you think I’d have agreed if I thought for ONE MOMENT you were going to whistle your way off who-knows-when afterwards, knowing god-knows-what? Not to mention DISCONCERTING,” he snarled. “Which is to say, if you’re under the impression that a ceremony would _not_ be COMPLETELY REDUNDANT,does that mean you’ve been thinking—or BEHAVING?!—as though it wouldn’t?!”

“Spike, you diced ninny,” Rosier sighed, curling up on his shoulder as though all the storming was completely over now and everything was cozy again. That punched the wind right out of Seth’s sails, which made Toby hide a laugh behind a cough. “Of course not. And _this_ ,” it aimed a squinty blue glare at Eileen without raising its head, “is why I’m mad at your mum. Because the reason it wouldn’t be completely redundant is that _wizarding marriages involve magic,_ Cleverboots, and the ceremony isn’t purely ceremonial. _That’s_ what I assumed you’d grown up knowing, until you said you thought the handfasting covenant was just a contract, just a piece of paper that could be torn up. It’s not. At all. How on earth did you get through Cissa’s wedding thinking that? Really! But I keep asking because there are things we can do with that that I want for us. It’s been blowing my mind, Spike, that you didn’t want some of them.”

There was another long pause. The temperature in the room didn’t actually change, for once, but it might as well have done. Toby was just thankful Seth had never been the sort of magicky boy who rattled windows and made plates fly about when he lost it. At least burns were quiet and you could find ways to explain them to the neighbors if you were creative.

In a nearly normal-person voice that sounded quite abashed in context, Seth asked curiously, “So am I angry at Mam, too, again?”

“I should think so, yep.” It grinned. “Yips the post-prandial lapdog.”

“Oh. —I’m not agreeing to anything, you understand, except to resentment for the withholding of information which would have facilitated a more informed decision.”

Right, Toby thought glumly. And putting an innocent sentence on the rack till it came out dislocated and arthritic as a bad textbook meant the boy wasn’t flustered at all at all.

“Oh, I understand,” the thing Toby was apparently stuck with assured his son, far too gravely. So it knew not to take Seth seriously when he came out with face-saving rubbish like that. Well, that was something.

“Well,” Toby said, standing up and stretching. “You two clearly have some talking to do, and I need a word with the spitfire here. Scones were lovely, ta.”

“Spitfire?” Rosier repeated, grinning. Ellie glared at it.

“Mam?” Seth asked uncertainly.

“Definitely not just paper,” Ellie assured him. “Not wanting an arranged marriage with a handfasting covenant like Mam had’s part of why I was so quick to marry your Da in the first place, even if it was going to mean living muggle.”

She glanced at Toby to see if he was going to take that badly, but he was still enjoying the way she’d smacked the lad and his thingy around. He waggled his eyebrows at her with admiring suggestiveness.

She rolled her eyes at him, but told the boy, “We can talk more about it another day if you’d rather get it from me than books or whatnot. For now, you two ought to be getting along, and your father wants a word.”

“Upstairs,” Toby put in, just to make sure they’d leave. His lad could play dumb as a stump when he felt like being difficult, but he was never slow on the uptake really.

Sure enough, Seth stood up very quickly with an appalled face, and said, “Right, we will be going _right now_ then, come on, Ev.”

“Aren’t you going to, er, fix it now you’ve, er, finished with the humiliation?” Toby couldn’t help asking.

Seth looked at him, and his face took on one of its special-revenge expressions. His arm crept around the lithe waist. “Oh, no,” he said sweetly. “As I said, he’d earned a punishment, but that was just for one little indiscretion. I’d have chosen something else if he hadn’t also, over the rest of lunch, earned a longer reward than man can endure.”

“…Oh, god,” Toby groaned, wanting a drink again. Or brain-bleach. Or at least a boatload of aspirin.

“I _thought_ that was what you were getting at,” the Rosier-thing purred, turning to squish up against him. Those damn butterflies!

Seth cupped the long hands he’d gotten from god-knew-where around it’s tanned face, pressed their foreheads together. Stayed there, unmoving, far too long, somehow making it impossible for anyone else to do anything, and not even in a way that felt like magic. Finally, low in his throat, he breathed, “What you did for me.”

“I wanted to,” the thing assured him. Toby wanted to call it detestably coy, but, sadly, it wasn’t. It just seemed to want to make sure he understood its position properly. “It wasn’t any trouble.”

“Not for you, you utter Venusian, I know it.” He bent to kiss it and it was all, despite his starved-horse face and the Rosier thing being completely against nature in every way, terribly Hollywood until the thing jumped him against the bookcase, knocking some of Ellie’s bottles of plants off, and they disappeared with a loud crack. Just like that. _Rude_.

“You asked for that,” Ellie remarked. He was going to protest, but she went on relentlessly. “That last, _and_ the fact he was such a codless chicken he couldn’t bring the first single human being he’s wanted to introduce us to since Lily Evans into this house without turning him into a woman. Punishment my arse; that was all you, Toby. Wizards care about blood, not bits. Just be thankful he didn’t lie to you and do it before they got here.”

“Why am I thankful I had to see things I didn’t want to see and know things I don’t want to know?” Toby asked plaintively. The whole business had been _unnatural_. With near-pornographic butterflies.

“Because he _gave you a chance,_ Tobias Snape,” Eileen snapped.

Toby thought about it. “How’d I do?”

Grudgingly, his wife smiled at him. “You’ve done worse.”

“Drunk, that’ll be.”

“I wasn’t counting Drunk Tobias.”

He brightened. “About that word, then, speaking of your arse.”

She shrugged, feigning disinterest. “Ey, well, Himself got the scones done, s’pose I’ve got some time.”

* * *

[1] I couldn’t decide between Legolas and Elrond, but then I decided Elrond in a Mary Poppins outfit wouldn’t look particularly out of place, what with his Resting Bitch Face.

[2] Communist Party of Great Britain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes** : Thinking Toby did not do at all well is, in 2014, perfectly reasonable. However, Eileen is looking at him from 1980, outside his head, and after years of watching him (and not ducking very well) when he hadn’t yet given up on the idea of a nearly-‘normal’ son and was therefore not half this mellow even when sober.
> 
>  **[Two Lovely Black Eyes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxoesda-QK0)**  
>  Strolling so happy down Bethnal Green  
> This gay youth you might have seen,  
> Tompkins and I, with his girl between,  
> Oh! what a surprise!  
> I prais'd the Conservatives frank and free,  
> Tompkins got angry so speedilee,  
> All in a moment he handed to me,  
> Two lovely black eyes!
> 
> Next time, I argued I thought it best,  
> To give the conservative side a rest.  
> The merits of Gladstone I freely pressed, When  
> Oh! what a surprise!  
> The chap I had met was a Tory true,  
> Nothing the Liberals right could do,  
> This was my share of that argument too,  
> Two lovely black eyes! 
> 
> The moral you've caught I can hardly doubt  
> Never on politics rave and shout,  
> Leave it to others to fight it out, if  
> You would be wise  
> Better, far better, it is to let,  
> Lib'rals and Tories alone, you bet,  
> Unless you're willing and anxious to get,  
> Two lovely black eyes!  
> —Charles Coburn


	66. Hogwarts, Hogsmeade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not usually Poppy Pomfrey who confiscates the paper airplanes at Hogwarts, and certainly not during summer, but Severus and Lily always do seem to do everything backwards, upside down, and out of season.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : more mentions of fpreg. Medical-professional POV.
> 
>  **Notes** : I'm so sorry this is late! It's not just RL being whirlwindish, which it is—I've had to re-write the damn thing three times. Originally it was a James chapter and set six chapters later. Seriously it has been driving me nuts and my beta psyche-girl is patience on a monument.
> 
> Also I apologize for any comments I haven't replied to. I've just been thoroughly overwhelmed lately. Hopefully things will settle down soon.
> 
> Also, I'm adding a picture to the last chapter. Sometimes if you ask for things you get them. ;)

Poppy had never thought she’d miss the fortnight before end-of-year exams under any circumstances, and particularly not during the summers.

That was the busiest week in her year. The day after Halloween and the weeks before the Christmas and Easter hols were always bad, with children stuffing themselves silly in Autumn and so restless in Winter and Spring that the number of accidents, pranks, and fights nearly tripled—although the number of both year-round and pre-holiday patients had dropped off significantly (and, blessed be, never recovered) when the Potter boy’s energies had been re-directed into using the Solemn Responsibility Of The Shiny Badge (which he’d never taken seriously when it had been poor little Lupin’s) to impress his girlfriend. It had stopped surprising Poppy when Dumbledore was right about things like that.

Still, even in the thick of the House Wars[[1]](https://www.fanfiction.net/docs/edit.php?docid=43115478#_ftn1), the pre-exam weeks had been worse. In mid-June, the school went regularly mad.

The anxious ones started breaking out in hives and having nervous breakdowns. The ones who thought studying was for swots ran around interfering with and jeering at the diligent students. The diligent students who thought they were weak in a subject they needed stayed up late studying and then had accidents in class due to lack of sleep. The students who liked to pretend they got good marks due to natural brilliance but actually worked hard for them (there were always a handful, and _they_ were always a handful) pestered other students _and_ had accidents.

As to the ones who were too keyed up to study, they distracted themselves with brooms and dares and snogging, with less regard for sensible safety precautions than they would ordinarily have done. And, of course, the poor souls who demanded everyone shut up so they could study and nagged their classmates to study more got hexed. Half the school, whether they liked to study outside or _avoid_ studying outside, forgot they could get sunburn and heatstroke, and there were far more bites and curses from Restricted books than in all the other months of the year put together.

It had only been about a month and a half; Poppy was sure she hadn’t forgotten how bad it really had been. Just because she was aware it had been better this year with the Prewett twins out and Slytherin and Gryffindor both lacking their most bellicose standard-bearers didn’t mean she’d forgotten. It had been almost as busy and full of nasty rashes and vomit as usual.

As awful as that time of year was, it was never bad enough to make Poppy cry _never again!_ and quit.

(Quite.)

But the next time Dumbledore suggested she open her rooms to other healers, she was going to make it entirely plain to him that the next person who had to share their office was going to be him.

Not that she begrudged the midwives the space. After all, she didn’t use it during the summer, and St. Mungo’s was overstretched. Though there hadn’t been another disaster since the giants at Orkney, people kept coming in hurt or cursed and confused about how it had happened, or otherwise missing stretches of memory. The rooms the midwives usually used were currently serving as a hastily-converted treatment site for muggles who’d gotten spell damage from apparently quite ordinary objects.

Wizardspace devisers were building a new wing for these cases into a room at St. Bart’s, so that magic-afflicted muggles wouldn’t have to be sneaked out from under the eyes of the muggle world or undergo more obliviation than was absolutely necessary. Poppy was assured that the midwives would have their own ward back by September, even if the devisers were having a tad more trouble putting a fireplace in for the floo than anticipated. So she didn’t mind sharing the Hospital Wing while she was away, really.

What she minded was having to come back to work twice a week when she was meant to be on holiday. Which she did. Because the wretched women had taken it for granted that being welcome to her ward meant being welcome to her supplies.

Or maybe it wasn’t the wretched women but their wretched superiors. Poppy was trying not to ask. Things weren’t bad enough to make her be ungracious.

Either way, though, she had to keep track of what they were using. Horace would throw a fit if she asked him to resupply all the depletions at once at the end of summer, even though he knew what was going on, and Minerva would throw a bigger fit if Poppy asked her to fit it all into the budget to be bought commercially. So they had to be kept in the loop, as did Pomona. Recently, in addition, Poppy had been having to keep on top of what that bloody elf was breaking.

Ordinarily she had to floo back to Hogwarts at the end of her holidays, which was a nuisance and not just because it was August. Access to Ministry floos could be pricey when it wasn’t a job perk, and fire-hopping internationally made things exponentially worse. This summer, Dumbledore had at least got her a portkey. An official portkey, too, not one of his stomach-churning home-made ones. He’d said it was the least he and the Ministry could do to thank her for loaning out her hospital wing, and she quite agreed.

She hadn’t said as much to the master of her castle who employed her, of course, but he’d chuckled quite as if he’d read it in her eyes.

So it was that Poppy was walking to the doors from the gates yet again, only moderately irritated about it and barely more nauseated than that (and, yet again, wondering what it would take to get Horace to find her a remedy for travel-sickness; didn’t he realize she was hardly the only person who'd have a use for one?). It wasn’t raining and, if it wasn’t the lovely, baked, mineral-scented heat of her grandmother’s waterfall garden in Aveyron, the air was pleasantly cool and the sky spotted with white clouds quite suitable for spying horses and turtles in.

So far she’d spotted a fluffy, white snail, crup, and Beater’s bat, and a piece of parchment folded into a vaguely triangular shape tapping its pointed nose plaintively against the Infirmary window. She strode over, checked for curses, and plucked it out of the air.

The hand was unfamiliar to her: joined-up writing, very clear and regular but a bit cramped, with small, spiky middle bits, upper and lower loops like tall sticks, barely slanted at all. The only sense of motion in it came from the whiplike crosses on the Ts and the curling upstrokes on the ends of some words. It was written in a greyish, faded-looking pigment that didn’t quite look like ink and smudged when she passed a curious thumb over it.

Most likely it had written by a muggleborn, Poppy thought, but that was really all she could make of it, other than that it had been travelling some distance and through a rainstorm and had not been warded against bird doings. There was, as far as she could tell (and she admittedly wasn’t an expert), no magic on it other than the spell that had made it fly to her window.

It read, _Don’t make me side with swine. CS not safe as all that. MWs don’t know how to do them, mg-med & τ_ _mix poorly. Don’t work to prevent: engagement makes them fix on you. Prime Directive the only safety._

It wasn’t addressed to anyone, and there was no signature. Poppy put it in her pocket and, instead of heading straight to the Hospital Wing, made her way to the Headmaster’s gargoyle. It didn’t open at her password, though she was sure she had the latest one, so she asked the portraits where Dumbledore was.

Minutes later, she was joining him in the library, where he was frowning his way through a stack of old Prophets. He smiled when he spotted her, though, and pulled out a chair for her with his wand. “My dear Madam Pomfrey, this is a surprise. I wasn’t expecting your report for several hours yet. We’ve already eaten, I’m afraid, but I do hope you’ll still be joining us for supper?”

“Of course I will,” she agreed, “especially as I haven’t been to the Infirmary yet. I’ve just arrived, and saw this tapping my window as I was walking from the gates.” She passed it over.

His bushy eyebrows raised, and he hummed thoughtfully. “Fascinating,” he mused. “Basil,” he addressed himself to the portrait of Headmaster Fronsac behind Irma’s desk, “would you be so good as to ask Mrs. Potter to join us here?”

“Certainly, Headmaster,” the portrait returned courteously, putting down his book. His olive brown eyes glittered with curiosity as he got up and walked out of sight through the frame.

“Do you know what it’s about, then?” she asked.

“Oh, I shouldn’t care to hazard a guess,” Dumbledore replied, twinkling genially. “But I’m very nearly certain I know who it’s from. Now, tell me, how is your grandmother? I trust her roses are thriving.”

“They’re doing very well, but she nearly broke her neck flying up to clip them back on Tuesday,” she sighed.

“Rogue wind?”

“Rogue lorelei,” she corrected. “And don’t ask me what a German river-nymph was doing in a French waterfall.”

“I’m afraid I must,” he apologized, delighted and intrigued.

“Well,” Poppy allowed, “I’ve no idea how she got there and none of us speak Mermish, but what she was _doing_ was backflips off the top.”

Dumbledore laughed, and they chatted about her Gran’s garden and the mermaids in the Black Lake until Lily Evans-as-was arrived, walking in with the careful saunter of a woman, still young enough to miss her dignity, who was accustomed to being the most graceful person in the room and refused to waddle even with a large pumpkin forcing her hipbones apart. “Hello, Professor, Poppy,” she said, her tone asking the question for her.

“You’re looking well, Lily,” Poppy smiled. Lily’s reaction to changing her last name had been to suddenly get on a first name basis with everyone who’d agree to it. She’d told Poppy that she didn’t secretly dislike her new surname as some newlyweds did, and was actually rather fond of the image of a flower properly housed and at home in a sturdy clay pot. However, she hadn’t been the type of bride-to-be to dwell dreamily on her married name (“Particularly,” she’d said, “as Jamie’s far too much of a git to moon over.” Poppy had asked if she was having regrets, and she’d laughed and said no; James was enormous fun when he wasn’t being unbearable, but anyone who thought himself romantic and dashing really shouldn’t be encouraged), and it had taken her several months to reliably answer to ‘Mrs. Potter.’

“Do sit down,” invited Dumbledore, pulling out another chair.

She thanked him, but when she sat it was with a little sigh. “I wish James wouldn’t throw a fit every time I want to take a walk,” she said mournfully. “I suppose it’d be worse at home, but honestly, he’s ridiculous. I keep telling him that there’s no problem with walking around, and the midwives tell him, too, but he keeps saying, ‘What if you get caught halfway across the grounds?’”

“Why,” Dumbledore answered, “I should think the elves would bring you back to the Hospital Wing.”

“That’s what I said,” Lily complained, “but he says we don’t know enough about how elves travel, and if it’s not safe for pregnant women to apparate they shouldn’t do it by elf, either.”

“It’s not really comparable,” Poppy frowned. “No one’s ever seen a house-elf splinch himself, and side-along with them is a much smoother ride. Besides, a house-elf with orders to bring a witch to a healer is bound to be more focused than the same witch distracted by labor pains. Witches lucky enough to have one usually do get to St. Mungo’s that way; its less likely than the floo to lose them their lunches.”

“You try reasoning with him,” Lily said darkly. “I suggested a floating chair, like a muggle wheelchair, but then he starts going on about what if it dropped.”

“I’m afraid it’s only to be expected of a new father,” Dumbledore said philosophically. “Both the foreseeable and the unforeseen are entirely terrifying.”

“Do you have children, sir?” asked Lily, curious. Ostensibly curious, at least. Poppy didn’t know if Lily knew she was challenging the old man’s right to sound wise in this matter, but she definitely was. He could do with it from time to time, in Poppy’s opinion. Like a health tonic, to maintain the balance of his humours.

“Sometimes as many as five hundred in a year, though none of my blood,” Dumbledore replied serenely, fishing about in his robes. “And I’ve seen so many become new fathers. Even the most sensible and courageous may go all to pieces. It’s quite a different thing to be brave about the helpless than about oneself, after, and we will fear where we love. Ice mouse?”

“I am not helpless,” Lily declared, but she took the sweet.

Poppy declined; in her opinion it wasn’t near hot enough for ice mice. Sympathetically, she finished for Lily, “But tell him that?”

Lily groaned agreement.

“I was referring to newborns rather than their mothers in any case,” Dumbledore said placidly, popping one of the mints into his own mouth and smiling as his teeth started shivering and making squeaky noises in his mouth. Breathing white vapor and speaking over the tiny, high-pitched noises, he continued, “That, however, was not why I asked you to join us here. Madam Pomfrey, you see, has found the most curious bird at her window.” He waved the piece of parchment, now folded up again, by the pointy bit.

Lily jumped a bit. Widening her eyes, she asked, “What is it?”

Poppy gave her a bit of a look. If there was one student who’d been at Hogwarts since she’d started working there who hadn’t lied to her about being either too ill to go to class or well enough to leave the Hospital Wing early, Poppy couldn’t think who. Not Lily Evans, anyway.

“A missive,” Dumbledore replied. “I’m afraid neither of us could make heads nor tail of it, but—”

“You read my mail?” Lily demanded, outraged.

Dumbledore looked at her mildly. “And why do you think it’s yours, my dear girl?”

“Oooh,” Lily accused him after a frozen moment of further outrage at being my-dear-girled. “You’re _trying_ to make me mad. Because you called me down here to look at it, that’s why. Tell me it’s not.”

Dumbledore smiled. “In fact, I do believe it was meant for you, but there’s no salutation.” He passed it over. “Tell me, what do you make of it?”

“I could make a swallow,” Lily smartarsed absently as she unfolded the note. “Or a fish. Never could manage cranes—oh, what is the _matter_ with you?” she demanded crossly, speaking to the note.

“I wondered that, myself,” Poppy murmured.

Lily looked up sharply, as if just remembering Poppy was in the room with her. She gave Dumbledore a _should Madam Pomfrey be here_ sort of look. Madam Pomfrey was, herself, wondering why she was here and Lily’s husband wasn’t, but she hadn’t been about to press her luck by asking. She was curious and, after all, the thing had been at the window of _her_ Infirmary.

Dumbledore spoke to Poppy, instead of answering Lily directly. “I must ask you,” he said, without twinkling, “to keep what we speak of here in complete confidence, but I think it wise you should know that Mrs. Potter’s friend has promised me his help, and I am extending him my trust. In case he should need your help, or simply your faith.”

It took Poppy a moment to work that out. Once she’d properly asked herself what friend of Lily Evans-Potter Dumbledore would think Poppy wouldn’t help without being told, drawn an utter blank, and then reminded herself that Dumbledore had never really got over being Head of Gryffindor, though, everything became clear. “I see,” she said drily.

The man was an idiot, although it never did Minerva much good to tell him so. To give him his due, he probably genuinely thought everyone was as political and partial as he was. It was, Poppy thought, a generous stupidity. The vast majority of extremely clever people she’d met were impatient when anyone couldn’t keep up with them, and by the time they graduated had long since gotten over the expectation that anyone could. Dumbledore, except when he was being mysterious on purpose, seemed to assume everyone he liked thought just like him.

Lily was back to railing at the absent author. “You don’t _have_ to be so mysterious, you loony,” she complained at the parchment, aggrieved, “you could have addressed and warded it! Like a normal wizard! I’d think that would draw a lot less attention!”

“In fact, I think our mutual friend had the seeds of a good idea, there,” Dumbledore told her. “This arrived without an owl. The gates let owls with packages pass over, but he is well aware that the wards on the grounds would do their best to stop anything they were bespelled to find suspicious come through. He may have thought that putting as little magic on it as possible would give it the best chance of reaching you.”

“Then,” Lily said flatly, “he could have used an owl.”

Dumbledore hummed noncommittally, as if he thought Snape couldn't have, or not without attracting attention. “Perhaps the two of you should come to some agreement—”

“Ha.” It was not a laugh. “He just does what he wants. And then he thinks he can go telling other people—”

This time Dumbledore’s hum was surprised. When Lily looked at him, he said with a smile and a little shrug, “Oh, it’s merely that, reading this note, one might almost imagine that the writer had been asked for his opinion.”

“I’m sorry?” Poppy asked after a moment, slightly arch and trying not to laugh, when she’d decided that Lily’s pouty noises had never contained any actual words.

“It can be a difficult thing to take,” Dumbledore told her, not trying half hard enough not to smile, “when one’s friends care more for you than for what you want.”

“It’s not about what I _want,_ ” Lily said sharply, “it’s about _my baby!”_

The look Dumbledore gave her, while still sympathetic, became rather sharper. “I think, my dear, that you had better explain.”

“Well,” she said, looking uncomfortably at Poppy, “I _hope_ you agree with me, sir, that it’s in my baby’s best interests to be born as soon as humanly possible. Or magically possible. Alice’s, too. Today, for preference.” Hastily, in the _it’s far too nice a day to spend in History of Magic just please let me pretend to have a cold, okay, I’ll even take Pepper-Up to make it look reasonable_ voice, she added, “Because we’re both going to run mad and start coaxing the poor things out with milk and cookies and butterfly nets if they kick us in the bladder one more time.”

When Poppy had given her the _why do people think they can lie to nurses_ look long enough, she added, “And possibly fishing rods.”

“Well, I understand you,” Dumbledore said, cutting off the discussion—more mercifully, Poppy felt, than Lily deserved for that piece of painful winsomeness. There were some people who, in Poppy’s opinion, lovely girls though they might be at heart, ought not, for the good of their souls, to have been born with dainty little lightly freckled noses and long eyelashes. “But I’m sure that many witches feel as you describe. I fear our friend,” he tapped the note, “may have a point, in that to engage is to volunteer to become the focus.”

“He didn’t even _take—”_ Lily stopped herself, and finished, “that class.”

“And when has a lack of formal instruction stopped any bright and inquisitive lad from learning what he felt he ought to know?” Dumbledore asked, smiling.

“Well,” Lily admitted, meeting his smile with a grumbly one of her own, “you may have a point there. He knew more about my sister’s boyfriends than she did for years. Well, not the ones in Liverpool, but all her summer romances. It drove her nutty.”

“Oh, dear,” Poppy chuckled, covering her mouth. “Did he harass them? He was terrible about anyone—” She checked herself when Dumbledore gave her one of his Mild Looks. Evidently they weren’t to use names at all. She wondered which of the portraits he distrusted, or what. “Anyone his roommate walked out with twice. Some of them needed calming potions, although he didn’t hex or dose anyone that I found out about.”

“What about his roommate’s cousins?” Lily asked, interested.

“The younger one,” Poppy said, “some of them. He seemed to feel the older one didn’t need his interference.”

Lily snorted. “No, I suppose not. As far as I know he didn’t do anything about Tuney’s boyfriends; he just told me things about them. I wish he’d told _her_ so _he’d_ have had the fights with her,” she complained. “But his problem is, he thinks finding out things the wrong way round makes him more of an expert than people who do it the right way.”

“There is something to be said,” Dumbledore reflected, “for a generalized expertise in out-of-the-way knowledge. It means one is more likely to be called on for the interesting problems than for what just anyone could do. And, of course, one can impress people at parties.”

“But it means you _don’t_ know the subject meat and potatoes, top to bottom,” Lily fired back. “And he doesn’t know this one.”

“Perhaps not,” Dumbledore agreed cheerfully, “but if _I_ tell you he has a point, I think you may take my word for it.”

Lily deflated a bit, but then she rallied. “But if the babies could be born before the last—” She looked at Poppy again. “Could be born this week. That wouldn’t be _getting in the way_ of the… the thing, it’d just be taking them out of the running.”

Dumbledore looked a little stern. “Once you interfere,” he said, “you’re taking responsibility. Are you willing to put this burden on another woman’s child?”

“I thought the whole point of penning us up in here was to obscure things so it'd look like no one fit anyway,” Lily said stubbornly. “As if one of the other interpretations was a better fit. I just want to make that _true._ And of course I’d want to help if someone else was in that kind of trouble. But if you think there isn’t _anything_ I wouldn’t do to keep _my baby_ out of it, except standing down and letting that kind of person do whatever he wants, you’re _crazy_. Maybe it’s because you’re a man and you’ve never had your own babies that you can even _begin_ to think that, but believe me: _that’s crazy._ ”

“Am I supposed to know what you two are talking about?” asked Poppy.

Dumbledore shook his head. He asked Lily, “It seems, then, that you have an idea? I was going to say, earlier, that surely many witches would give birth early if it were a safe thing to do.” He looked at Poppy.

“It’s not my field, of course,” she demurred, “but yes, I know it’s not something anyone reputable has ever wanted to mess about with except in an emergency. There are too many things that might affect infants Merlin-knows-how. The Divination people always scream bloody murder, in particular, and in the last hundred years or so everyone else has also gotten uneasy about how things that happen very early in life might affect a person later on—perhaps even forever.”

“I’ve gotten all that from Madam Warrington,” Lily said impatiently. “Repeatedly. Let’s just take it as read, for the moment, that the kinds of things that the diviners and pediatricians are worried about are not my first concern right now.”

“Diviners and _whats?_ ”

“Er… muggle healers for children.”

“Well, then,” Dumbledore said amiably, “if it wasn’t healing matters that you wanted to discuss,” as if _he_ hadn’t called for _her_ because of what _Poppy_ had found, “perhaps we oughtn’t to keep Madam Pomfrey from her inventory any longer. I have no doubt that she is eager, if not to do it, than to be done with it.”

Poppy had the urge to acidly ask the old goat if she was to take that to mean that she was dismissed. Since she did quite want to be done with the inventory, though, and she didn’t really want to be involved with whatever Dumbledore was scheming about now _at all_ , she elected to dismiss herself gracefully.

She supposed the Snape boy had known the risk he was taking, opting to try for stealth by being magically quiet instead of by magically ensuring that no one could read his note, but she couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty about the nuisance he was surely in for now. He’d never been afraid to stand up for himself against, as some of the children had put it in those days, The Man, or even to shout at The Beard, but it had never done him any good.

 

* * *

[[1]](https://www.fanfiction.net/docs/edit.php?docid=43115478#_ftnref1) She still couldn’t help smiling when she remembered that time in ’74 when the Snape boy had asked for an appointment and very seriously laid out a Madam Pomfrey’s Cost-Benefit Analysis Regarding Me Sleeping Or At Least Doing My Homework Locked In Her Office For the Rest Of Term.

 Apparently Snape had been feeling especially hounded in the aftermath of the latest Quidditch game, even if it wasn’t Gryffindor his House had beaten. He’d been sure that if he didn’t keep out of everyone’s way, she’d soon have work enough to balance out the annoyance of him taking up one tiny corner of her office. It would only have been, he’d assured her, until Gryffindor did something brainlessly ‘gloriffic’ enough to make them feel happy about themselves and stop foaming at the bit to trample all over him. But until then, he’d been sure it was absolutely necessary.

Especially, he’d claimed vengefully, as if he’d had to look at young Rosier’s ‘stupid, smug, emptyheaded, oversexed face’ one more night he was going to smother it in its sleep. Rosier, he’d insisted virtuously when she’d raised an eyebrow at him, would be much better off without it. People would stop interrupting Rosier's studying to thrust their filthy, entitled, grabby hands into his robes, then. Probably. Or did she think a hag-glamour would be better? Yes, he’d decided, that would probably get him into less trouble than outright suffocation or mangling.

 She’d fed him half a pot of chamomile tea with lavender and lemon balm biscuits while he argued his case,  and allowed him to hide in her office _for that afternoon only_ in return for clearing an infestation of doxies out of her linen closet. She had, however, refused to give him any chasteberry or skullcap extract to put in Rosier’s pumpkin juice.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Aberforth is not alone in performing inappropriate charms on animals and Evan is just a little too good at apples for anyone's comfort.
> 
>  **Notes** : τ or tau here is meant to stand for _thau_ maturgy, so Severus's note reads, 'Caesarean sections aren't as safe as all that and mediwizards don't know how to do them. Muggle medicine and magic mix poorly.' And yes, he did make a Star Trek reference at the end—just for that extra layer of secrecy in case of a Death Eater intercept, of course!


	67. Dartmoor, Devon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Aberforth is not alone in performing inappropriate charms on animals, Severus can't answer a yes-or-no question without five minutes of morbid paranoia, and Evan is better with apples than anybody should be comfortable with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : pseudo-het? Nongraphic established-relationship action while the genderbending from the previous chapter is still in play. Also Severus is going for his goth badge. And making a dentist's appointment might not be a bad idea, what with all the tooth-rotting fluff (despite Severus _really trying_ for that goth badge. It's the lack of black, baby, you'll figure it out).

"I'm not doing that again," Evan said firmly when they reappeared, untangling himself. "Just so you know."

"Seeing them at all or getting ogled in a way that was asking for a punch in the face?" Severus asked, accepting with grace both the implied reproach and that being jumped had been for show.

It was one of those things that alternately made Evan like Severus very much and made him want to tear his hair out (or maybe Spike's hair. Evan's was too good to abuse): when Severus felt he'd done someone a wrong, whether or not he believed he'd actually been wrong to do it, he didn't bluster or hedge. That had made Evan want to scream back in fifth year when he'd tried to camp outside Gryffindor tower just because he'd called a politically-blind idiot an admittedly-nasty name she'd more or less forced him into, but it was working for Evan at the moment.

So he wasn't unhappy about that tendency in _Spike_ right now. No, what made him uneasy was that Mr. Snape had looked sullen and guilty instead of arguing, when Evan had shot accusations at him, in such a very familiar way. And apparently he was the parent who played word games. Evan was _incredibly_ unhappy about that, even though he'd already known that Mr. Snape had never sent Spike suitable and useful books at birthdays and holidays like his wife did. They'd always been ones he'd personally liked himself, books Spike got panicked about letting other Slytherins see but kept to read anyway.

He didn't want to think about that at all, but really not now. So he said, lightly, "Barbarian. Well, you can't blame him," preening a little and smoothing the hyacinths down his curves.

"Oh, _can't_ I." Spike's hands were quick to follow his, curling around him, the unaffected public-face reserve he'd put on for his parents evaporating away under the hot July sky.

"—but the latter, yes."

"No," Severus agreed, and kissed him. This being as close to either thanks or apology as one got from Severus, other than the offhand sort, Evan took it in the spirit intended, though he would have liked a rather longer one. He'd been in Spike's lap with his chest sensitized in unusual ways, all pressed against him and wrapped up, and he'd had to just _sit_ there. Talking. For _ever_. "It was one of those things where doing it as a first impression means you don't have to do it again."

"Care to explain?"

Severus looked wry, resigned and both proud and a little disgusted with himself. "I told you years ago how muggles feel about men together, or women."

"Right. That's what that was about, I assumed. Although coming in before I took the potion was interesting planning."

"Not wholly what it was about. Step two. That attitude pales, you see, in comparison with… or, well, perhaps, marries and forms an even greater monster with how they feel about men who decline to be simply and wholly men, without ambiguity."

Evan stared at him, and not just because of his word choice. "So you wanted to make extra-sure your magic-hating father would loathe me unrelentingly to the depths of his being forever? It's not that I wanted to be best mates with the man, but Merlin, Spike, talk about 'completely redundant.'"

Spike looked amused. "It was a bit of a risk, I grant you, but what was there to lose, really? No—I'm wagering that the _next_ time he sees you, as yourself, showing no inclination to be other than a man, he'll be so damned relieved he'll wring your hand and try to get you interested in football and all his favorite shows on the telly. Well… the time after that."

"Worth a try," Evan agreed, after reviewing the strategy. "He asked me how often you turn into a woman while you were in the kitchen though. Just so you know."

Spike's face twitched. "And I hadn't warned you—go on, tell me the worst, what did you do."

"I said, exactly as often as you like," Evan told him, and watched curiously to see how he'd take it.

The long face was a study, but eventually settled on mild sadism. "That'll drive him mad," he observed.

"Well, I thought it would." he agreed, turning around to lean against Severus. They didn't do this nearly as often as Mr. Snape might be thinking, so it always felt quite odd for Severus to be even a little taller than him, let alone broader-shouldered. Nice, though, although he wouldn't have wanted to be stuck with it. It was funny how just that tiny shift in size difference made him notice the bedrock-stubborn and silently-watching parts of Severus and feel there was an immovable guardian wall at his back, rather than a smallish high-strung dragon with flame-incontinence tugging at a leash he was clutching with both hands, as one so often did with Spike.

There was really quite a lot of sky, he noticed when he'd finished musing on the tricks a body could play on its brain. The scrubby grass looked familiar, too, as if he'd been standing on it all week. "Did you take us back to Dartmoor?" he asked.

Spike hummed agreement. Feeling it down his back, Evan resolved to do that when Spike was lying on him sometime; it was very cozy even this way, but he thought he could do it differently. "You've been not-whinging about wanting to ride the horses all week," he said down Evan's collar. "It was noted."

Evan sighed happily, and pulled Spike's arms around him, leaned him down to sit in the grass, just as they were. Just at the moment he didn't give a toss about the horses, although it would be a pity to waste the chance entirely.

"If someone were going to kill me," Severus said reflectively after a while, "I'd much rather it be you than anyone else."

Evan turned around a bit to stare at him. "Why, good afternoon, Morbid," he said cordially. Severus shrugged. "Why, because ghosts find it easiest to haunt their killers?"

"That is a point," Severus allowed, all mellowly judicial, nosing behind his ear so that Evan had to laugh, despite himself. "No. There are two kinds of murders—to make something happen, and to stop something happening. When it's to make something happen, most of the time what's really wanted is catharsis or reaction. The murderer wants to cause pain, or make the victim admit defeat or inferiority, or to vent his feelings about something. If it's personal."

"This was a much less creepy afternoon on a very lovely moor before you started talking," Evan observed. "I was mixing blues for the clouds in my head."

"But I've never seen you get the kind of angry where you need to make someone else feel something," Severus mused on. " _Do_ something, yes."

"I hit you that time in fourth year," Evan offered, because going along was just easier.

Severus hitched a shoulder against his back. "You only thought you were angry because you couldn't distinguish between different kinds of adrenaline spikes."

"I'm rather certain I was angry, Adrenaline Spike."

"Have it your way, it's your adrenaline."

"—Spike," Evan finished, even if he was amusing only himself.

Spike paused, and said, in a long-suffering tone, "Quite." Evan, inside his own head, grinned and hugged himself and jumped up and down. "Either way, you hadn't processed anything like that before…?"

He shook his head.

"And I haven't seen you go off hot like that since. Seen you go cold, though, and you don't do it like Narcissa."

"Not _actually_ a girl," Evan reminded him.

"I _meant_ she likes seeing her prey squirm. Preferably for months. Her favorite part is watching them be grateful when she gets bored."

"I dunno, I think she enjoys the planning stage, too. And the part where they first realize. And then when they realize they're stuck."

"Oh, yes," Severus agreed. "To a hammer, everything's a nail."

"…Er?"

"I mean, it's not just that she enjoys those things when they come up as part of a necessary plan, she'll go out of her way to include them in her reactions to being crossed, because that's such a large part of her payoff."

"Much better to just admit she's the uncrowned queen of the universe at once and let her go off in other directions," Evan agreed.

"But what you want when you're opposed," Severus went on, "is to not be opposed, so you can do the thing you wanted to do in the first place."

"…Doesn't everyone?"

"No, I've just said. Some people want revenge, some people want to win, some people want to win the opposition to their side, or see what they can gain in other areas out of the situation. People can be distractible."

"You want to win," Evan informed him.

He felt Severus's mouth twitch against his hair. "I'm willing to take a temporary setback and be wrong if the other party's rightness can teach me something," he said. "I want the best course and the truth." He paused. "It's just that so much of the time other people are idiots. And I don't want _them_ to win."

"See?" Evan laughed. "I can't just be right. You have to qualify it because you want to win."

"I have to qualify it because you _oversimplified and made a blanket statement,_ " Severus growled, but since he was stroking the shirt above Evan's tree tattoo with his thumb, Evan didn't worry.

"Okay," Ev allowed. "You want to be right, which usually means you win but may mean someone else was righter than you first."

"Now you win," Severus agreed. Evan gave him points for suppressing the objection to the word 'righter' that Ev knew was paining him deeply. "But you won't, in winning, distract me."

"No, that would only be if you'd won," Evan grinned.

"You just want your obstacles gone, I said," Severus ploughed on stoically. "With as little disruption and mess as possible. It's easiest to kill a person if they're not defending themselves. If you decided you had to kill me, it wouldn't be out of passion; you wouldn't be doing it to make me feel something. To cut off all feeling, maybe, not to make more. You'd do it in my sleep; I'd never know."

Evan considered asking what Severus's emergency plans for killing him were. He thought about doubling down on noting how morbid Severus was being. Then he asked himself why Severus was saying this creepiness now. Today. After this morning, after lunch, after Spinner's End.

He didn't turn around, because Severus wouldn't want him to see his expression, even if there wasn't one. There was always the penseive, anyway, for when Severus felt less raw about it. "No," he agreed. "No, we didn't take Divi, but I can't see myself hurting you on purpose, either."

A very long moment, and then the relaxation against his back made him notice how tense and tight Severus had been. "I suppose we can review the options," he said. "Just to look."

Evan leaned back on him and smiled. "What did you think I was going to say?" he asked, amused.

"Might've laughed at me," Severus muttered.

"You're funny, for a cobra," Evan agreed, because what Severus had meant was _you might not have understood_. "A very odd duck."

"Scrimgeour's funny, for a cobra," Severus sniffed. "According to Luke, anyway."

"Scrimgeour's only funny because you were half his size and bit him accordingly, Spike," Evan smiled. "Ergo, you're still funny: he was your canvas and has not been sufficiently turpentined."

"Just whitewashed?"

"Not according to Lucius…"

Severus asked, reluctant, "Is this something we can look up without attracting attention or do we need to take advantage of still being more-or-less on vacation and not closely watched?"

"What, Scrimgeour's reputation?"

"Evan…"

He smiled. "Depends. How do you feel about attracting Narcissa's attention?"

"Oh god."

"If we do anything and don't involve her she'll never forgive us."

"I wouldn't dream of it, but there's a time and a place, and the time to tell her would not be while there is one single preparatory plan left to make or put into practice. Tell her clandestine and one ends up with a costume ball under gaslight with all the 'reputable' families invited."

"But masks mandatory," Evan said, being fair.

"As if costumes and masks don't tell at least as much about a person as their everyday clothes," he snorted.

"There are lots of books," Evan told him. "It's just a question of getting one. How do you feel about attracting _Linkin's_ attention?"

"Everything I just said about Narcissa goes double for your mother with the added horror of she wouldn't _try or pretend_ to accept clandestine."

"I'm sure Reggie would let us use the Grimmauld Place library. We could even get out of explaining why."

Severus hesitated. "Yes," he said slowly, "but I don't like the odds that someone would look into which book—no, wait." He frowned.

Evan waited.

"Didn't you tell Linkin you wanted to look into the Prince marriage? That was about this, wasn't it."

He nodded. "There are lots of things that can be done with a handfasting. Some of them are, er, controlling. Or nasty. Developed for arranged marriages with, er, reluctant participants or spoils-of-war consortships and so on."

Severus nodded slowly. "All right. If we need to, we can tell Reg or Linkin I want background reading on the Prince problem; they wouldn't question that."

"Whereas Narcissa would squeal in registers audible only to banshees, apologize, tell us she believes us, and start making arrangements for a June event."

"Even though it would be also-true. _Precisely._ But I'd still rather not go to Black libraries as a first resort, and certainly not to rely on them entirely. I'd like a balanced viewpoint, if possible."

"Balanced?"

"I'd expect," he said dryly, "that any spellbooks your family has lying about the place would contain more than their fair share of 'interesting' offerings. Naturally I want to see those, but I would want to review the entire field of available spells."

"Even the insipid ones?" Evan grinned.

"The leviosa is a first-year spell considered utterly Light and fluffy," Severus said haughtily, "but you could use it to drop a cannonball on a man's head, and from it we derive the levicorpus."

"That's right, 'we' do," Evan agreed gravely. "I suggest you take your waistcoat off now."

"Why?" asked Severus guardedly, though he was already leaning away to do it.

"I need something to sustain me before we ride into town and I have to go chat to some eighty-year-old shopkeeper about my knitting and how excited I am about my wedding dress and how my mother-in-law-to-be is fighting me on the flower arrangements. It was a long morning."

"You could say you're bridesmaid," Severus pointed out, amused, his hands slow and savoring on Evan's own buttons. "And that it's an errand you've been roped into, and complain about everything Narcissa put us through in the present tense."

"Choices, choices," Evan sighed, and pushed him flat to be a pillow.

"You gave away my sunscreen," Severus reminded him, when he was content just to lie there with the light washing his back through his shirt, his Spike all warm and heart-beatish under him, smelling sun and skin and spicy soap and half-toasted grass. "You'll burn. _I'll_ burn."

Evan mumbled disinterested noises into his neck without bothering to try to make words out of them. He felt more than heard a great sigh, and then there was a quiet whooshing-growing sort of sound and his face and hands were cooler. Without looking up, he pointed his wand at Severus's transfigured probably-beach-umbrella and turned it into a giant lacelike parasol. Spike could gripe about the style, if he wanted, but Evan wanted to be _warm._

Evidently Spike's hands were also quite concerned to ensure that Evan be very warm indeed.

When he'd finished shuddering and had forced himself to pull their mouths very nearly apart, he asked with as much indignation as he could muster, "Why am I by myself, here?"

"At length," Severus rumbled into him with ambiguous promise, deeply amused. "Because one of us has not had his body reset since this morning and has made plans for evening and home."

Evan grumbled, but he supposed Severus had a point. Which he would accept, as long as those fingers didn't go away before he was ready, since not-wanting-to clearly was not a factor. And it was, he supposed, a better answer than 'because I do not wish to fall asleep in the sun when we have things to do,' or 'because one of us is not keen on being less than alert or fully dressed while out in the open in the middle of the day, no matter how isolated the spot.' Both of which he suspected of comprising a higher percentage of the truth than what Severus had actually said. Eh.

Eventually and reluctantly he disentangled himself and composed his clothes. This included casting an illusion on them, as his waistcoat was an unique Twillfit creation, quite likely to draw attention and stick in the memory. And he _wasn't_ transfiguring it. A pincushion would be the least of his troubles.

"So," he asked, doing up the last button on what was now pretending to be a set of light summer robes, "apparate into town?"

"No," Severus said resignedly. "Go on."

Evan grinned. Severus was clearly still feeling in debt, but that wouldn't last for something Ev hadn't even minded much, so he might as well take advantage. "Got an apple?"

Severus had peels, peeled slices, and seeds in three different vials. It probably ought to have been alarming how much he could tuck into his pockets and how many wand holsters and potion-carrying strappy things he could hide without even wearing a robe (Evan, when he thought about it, just wanted to play hide and seek). But then, Narcissa's tailor did get paid twice for putting up with him.

After deciding against planting a tree in an area that obviously didn't want apple trees (or it would have had some by now, surely), Evan selected a slice. He put it in Severus's open palm, which heated obligingly for him (though Severus looked more put-upon and long-suffering than obliging, really). When he began to smell baked apple, he took his wand and traced his spell onto the slice. _Ehwaz, ansuz, wunjo, gebo._

The aroma intensified until the whole clearing smelled like pies, only crisper and more raw, with a greener note of clover. It was only a few minutes before a couple of horses came picking their way towards them curiously, sniffing. They sat still while the horses approached and decided they weren't wolves or bears, and then fed them the rest of the apples because Evan had, after all woven the promise of a gift into his enticement.

"Two horses," Severus said dryly, holding and patting each in turn while Evan put apple peels on the broad backs and turned them into horse tack. "How literal." Evan shrugged.

The horses were both quite surprised at the transfiguration, not being used to weight on their backs or straps crawling over their faces. Severus held their heads loosely, though, and looked them right in the eye and talked quiet incomprehensibility at them (his father's accent hadn't been half that bad; it was just as tangled as it had been his first day of school) and fed them apple slices until they stopped hating everything.

Then they switched off so Severus could get the cushioning and balance charms onto the saddles and what he called a translation charm onto the reins and stirrups, since Ev had had mercy on the poor wild co-opted things and made the bridle bitless. It might not have been any easier on the horses' faces than a bit would have been in their mouths, but he wasn't going to force anything into anyone's mouth while Severus was watching.

"Do they like us enough yet?" he asked when it looked like Severus was done. He hoped so. There was horse drool on his shoulder, and the stupid mare had evidently mistaken his hair for hay. Spike, the rotter, had not gotten drooled on, let alone nibbled.

"I think so," Spike said judiciously, coming around to pet noses and gaze piercingly with soft, wide eyes into even wider brown ones. "How much do you trust your runework?"

"How much do you trust your 'translation spell' you just made up?" Evan fired back.

For answer, Severus swung himself up onto the dappled-grey mare's saddle, leaving the chestnut one for Evan. He managed to stay on while the horse got used to the weight and idea of him, largely because his form was abysmal and he had no compunction about lying down over the mare's neck (it was a shallow saddle, granted, but Ev was sure the pommel hadn't been bendy when he made it) either to grab her mane or stroke her.

Evan got bucked off twice, despite the charms on the saddle, largely because he was the wrong shape with the wrong reach but also because he didn't want horse sweat all over his clothes. A smirking Spike cushioned the ground for him the first time, and the horse came over to nose him anxiously until the world stopped spinning. On his second try, Severus caught him with a leviosa and put him right back in the saddle. This seemed to convince the horse that panicking wasn't getting her anywhere, and she slowly calmed down.

"Don't you do that charm," Evan said, pleased with his spellwork, when his mare was resigned to him and had been fed a slice of apple in appreciation. "You'd get a whole hypnotized herd of adoration."

"I'll keep that in mind," Severus said dryly. "Come on."

Apparently even Ev's enticements and Severus's communication charms could only do so much, because it took some time before the horses started responding smoothly to knee signals or posture cues and stopped being annoyed by the reins. Once the horses were on board, though, they all had an excellent gallop over the moors. They rarely did exactly this; the Malfoy horses mostly had wings.

When they were riding close, Spike, who had all the breeding of an otter, accused Evan of riding like a maypole. Evan accused him of riding like a Hun. Spike took that completely the wrong way, completely on purpose, and thanked him smugly before literally going around him in circles. At least a circle and a half.

Naturally Evan couldn't let him get away with that. But he thought the horses were enjoying the ensuing game of tag as much as they were. At any rate, their ears looked happy.

Later, Severus growled glumly that if they'd just foregone the fooling around and gone straight to town, they would have ended their day nicely and as planned. Asked what he'd do if he had a time-turner, though, he did not say 'warn myself,' just got more grumbly.

The difficulty was that they rounded what might have been a Neolithic hut, for all Evan knew (he could probably have gotten a more accurate description from Spike if he'd cared at all) and nearly ran over Rabastan Lestrange.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes** : I was going to put 'game of tig,' which is probably what Severus would have said if he could have made himself say such a thing. Evan, though seems to have had the choice of growing up with 'tag' or 'had-he-hit.' (Or, more likely, had-she-cursed.) Although he might have made 'tag' sound like 'tig' to some of us anyway.


	68. Still Dartmoor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The world's not divided into good people and Death Eaters. Aurors know it, the Order knows it, even Sirius knows it. Now, if we can just keep the other Death Eaters from finding out...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : Serious nastiness. I said the odds of anything being as bad as the ducks were low, but Lestranges happen and this is bad enough that you could probably make a drinking game out of how many times your narrator swerves to avoid getting there. Specific trigger warnings in endnotes; view as a chapter and page to end to avoid seeing any chapter text.
> 
>  **Notes** : Fandom has speculated on some interesting possible uses for arithmancy, often having some overlap with divination or potions. This chapter uses arithmancy in a way that has more overlap with other disciplines. That does not exclude the uses which with readers may be more familiar. Math being like that.
> 
> Fun name facts! Severus, Rodolphus, and Regulus have already been at least sort of covered in-text, but:
> 
> Evander is a Greek name meaning 'good man.' That would be the eu- prefix magically acquiring a V and rendering the name pronounceable there—amazingly, well before Ellis Island!
> 
> Rabastan appears to be a slightly made-up name, but Rastaban is the Arabic name for Beta Draconis, a star in the constellation Draco. It means 'the serpent's head.'
> 
> A story exists that Oprah was named via a misspelling of 'Orpah,' an Old Testament name which, admit it, sounds a bit like something that happens after a large meal (oh, those Moabites), and Magrat Garlick canonically was meant to be Margaret. So even if Bast was a typo of JK's and and not a she-thought-it-sounded-better (I think Rastaban sounds dashing), don't hate. u.u
> 
> Both their surnames mean exactly what they sound like. There is an RL Rosier family with an existing coat of arms. Yes, it has roses. They are yellow. The wizarding family's coat of arms has blue ones. Sez me. :D

Rabastan had always looked too much like Regulus for anyone's comfort, though there was enough of his brother in his jaw, brow ridge, and late-autumn hair that his mother had been spared the speculation of the schoolyard rumor mills. When the two were standing together, people who didn't know them often took Reggie's anxiousness to please (or at least not get shouted at) as one with the buzz of restive, slightly dreamy energy under Bast's eyes. When he was next to Evan, which didn't happen often, there were comments about how vague the youth of today were and how it was probably potions and drugs.

Ev thought that if Severus ever stood within twenty feet of Rabastan for longer than a tenth of a second and a Gryffindor looked at them, the comments would be about slimy, calculating Slytherins, just look at the gears turn in their eyes. He'd told his theory to Severus once, who'd considered taking offense for a minute but then quipped, "Which makes me Calculating."

The story had gotten back to Rodolphus, who'd given Severus a cuff upside the head and a broken arm. But it hadn't been his wand arm. Severus had thought Rus hadn't meant to do more than give him a good bruise with the punch, said he'd even been a bit contrite afterwards. If only in a 'now look what you made me do!' sort of way. It was true that Rus and Severus got along, but Ev was quite sure Severus wouldn't have risked making as unambiguous a Remark as that about any wife of Rus's, even one who was nothing like Bella.

Maybe it was because Rabastan did have the same tall, willowy frame and wore the same fashionable hairstyle as Reg, sweeping fringe and shoulder-length hair tied back in a club (Evan didn't bother with keeping up a fringe, just pulled it all back, and his hair waved so it looked quite different anyway. Sloppy, Narcissa said when she was feeling snappish) that it had taken Ev as long as it had to work out what was going on. Or it could have been, as Severus was always saying, because Evan liked for there not to be trouble in his life and would close his eyes to it when he could.

Severus's more occasion-specific theory later, when Evan told him he was giving Ev too much credit for sangfroid, was that Ev simply wasn't the sort of person to whom Bast Lestrange was in any way comprehensible. Ev would raise an eyebrow and ask, "And you are?" And he would shrug, and say, "I understand enough to see what I'm looking at."

The thing was that Evan didn't. Despite having known the stiletto snake (not an epithet: the man's Slytherin name, honorably if uneasily given) nine years, he still halted his horse and, for at least a minute and a half, thought he was looking at a young wizard having a picnic with a young lady.

Bast whipped around on his blanket with his wand out. Seeing that the person holding a wand on him in turn was Severus, with Evan quite relaxed, if surprised, on the chestnut at his side, he relaxed a bit, let the tip dip slightly. "Lance," he acknowledged them cautiously, "Naj. This is an unexpected surprise."

"Indeed," Severus agreed, coolly cordial, "but an expected redundancy."

Rabastan's top lip twitched, like he wanted to sneer. So did Severus's, as if he wanted to smirk. Rabastan's eyes fluttered, as if trying not to roll. Severus was now smirking right through his poker face, although Evan noticed that his eyes were flat black ice.

"Lovely day for it," Evan remarked, amiably inane. "We've been having a ride, don't you know."

"I can see that," Rabastan agreed in his usual condescending talking-to-Evan-and-Lockhart tone. "Is there any particular reason you've got knockers, Lance?"

"Vanity," Severus informed everyone in an _I have had to put up with this nonsense so long I can no longer muster the energy to be snide about it_ tone. "No other model would do for the painting he wants, apparently."

This had probably also been a factor in Ev's slowness, because Spike's complete brilliance would have distracted _anybody_ from noticing other things _,_ Evan was sure. Of _course_ he wanted to do a living portrait of him and Spike, today, out here somewhere good, with the horses. Not to be their primary afterlife retreat—Merlin, no. Just one they could come to sometimes. He'd get Spike to let Grandfather paint their primary if he had to Imperius the stubborn prat, but this one he could do from pensieve.

"Ah," Bast said, looking at Evan's illusory robes. Which were more of a frock. They might have made Mr. Snape rather more comfortable than his real clothes.

"I thought I might let the old hair down and call up a wind, don't you know," Evan confided seriously. "Could gaze out wistfully over a tor and grey out the landscape to bring out m'hair, or do one of those sporty ones, what do you think?"

"Just as you like," Bast said politely. Ev wondered whether he was even trying to hide his contempt because Ev had been his prefect, or because he knew Spike would turn him heels-up like a first-year, or for Reggie and Bella's sake.

"Well, enough about utterly wasting my first and last free afternoon," Severus droned. "You seem to be, er, spending yours more productively."

"Oh, yes, how rude of us," Evan smiled sleepily. "Do introduce us to your friend."

To his surprise, Bast laughed. He laughed as if Evan had made a legitimately funny joke, on purpose. "Oh, by all means," he said. "Go on, introduce yourself."

The woman was blonde, but had dyed her hair with streaks of red. Her lipstick was badly smeared, but she didn't bother to fix it when she turned to them and said in a hoarse, strained, voice, at once mechanical and badly slurred, "Hello, I am a piece of Muggle filth the great and glorious Master Lestrange is honoring with the chance to service wizardkind before I am mercifully put out of my squalor and misery."

"Service?" Severus inquired, coolly curious, at the same time Evan realized blankly, "Her lips are off."

"It's quite interesting," Bast reported, telling Evan generously, "You can have a go, if you like—oh, well, I suppose you can't, just at the mo."

"No, not really," Evan agreed with placid regret. The part of his brain that formed thoughts with words and pictures wasn't entirely sure _what_ he couldn't. He could, however, feel that he did know, really, deeper down, and furthermore that he was going to have nightmares about it, probably with Spike or Reggie in a starring role.

Bast eyed Severus and then shrugged a bit. "Rude to offer to only one, I suppose," he offered with a half-hearted attempt at graciousness. Evan didn't think it even really qualified as 'manners,' but he was aware he might be judging Bast more harshly than he would have yesterday. Or five minutes ago.

Evan was sure Severus was going to blast Rabastan to Merlin's Crystal Cave, but his friend tilted his head consideringly, shrugged a bit, and swung down off his horse. "Well," he said, passing the reins to Evan, "Might as well see what you lot get up to, at least. Reg never tells us anything. Besides, I suppose I owe to Narcissa to give her brother-in-law a VD screen."

"A what?" Bast raised an eyebrow.

"Some of the vermin are _diseased,_ Lestrange," Severus said patiently, approaching him. "With rather foul chronic illnesses which most commonly pass through… service."

"Oh, that's right," Evan nodded. "Dad and Lucius's father designed a curse that does that. That one's incurable. Well, for them, at least. Quite nasty. Don't know if you remember when it seemed as if Mr. Malfoy was always sick with something or other?"

Rabastan nodded, looking more interested than alarmed.

Evan shrugged. "Dad says it turns out he'd been a bit careless while they were working on it."

"And let his power-slippage and Augustus Rookwood's face remind us all to always use proper lab procedure," Severus said. Even on him it almost sounded pompous, but Evan, at least, could tell that he was including himself in that 'all,' and more than the rest of them. "Now, let's make sure you haven't picked up anything nasty." He shot a disdainful glance at the empty-eyed girl, and added, "Nastier."

Rabastan eyed him and his wand warily, hand on his own, but he could recognize a medical scan when he saw and heard one. Severus was perfectly normal and above-board until about three-fifths of the way through the scan, some little time after Bast had started to relax and look bored but before impatience had set in. Then, without his tone changing in the least, his scan turned into a, " _Nescio,_ " followed by an obliviate, a deafness spell, and his 'adamant tablet' no-new-memories charm. He steered the suddenly obliging, zoned-out Rabastan to sit a little inside the doorway of the hut, facing in, so nothing outside would catch his peripheral vision.

"Phew," Evan remarked, getting down off and leading the uneasy horses to be tied to a post by the ancient hut-thing that had probably been put there for exactly that purpose by the original residents. "It's not that I even almost believed you, Spike, but yeargh."

"Thank you," Severus said gravely. "You were rather impressively foul yourself. Keep an eye on him, will you? He shouldn't come out of tra-la nation until I take it off, but let's be safe."

"La-la land," Evan corrected him, smiling despite both himself and the girl.

Severus made an _eh_ noise as though it had been a mistake and not an attempt to lighten the mood, and went over to examine her. Eventually he asked, his voice quite steady, "May I kill your cousin-in-law?"

Evan shrugged. "Can we get away with it?"

There was a short pause. Regretfully, Severus answered, "Possibly; at least, this is most likely the best chance we'd ever have. But under the circumstances I judge it too valuable that we be both able to swear to clean hands under veritaserum, no matter who's doing the administration."

"Okay," Evan said philosophically. He'd known something like that was coming. It had been evident to him and Narcissa since third year that their Spike was, under the snarls and spines, a complete squish. Maybe not by Hufflepuff standards. "This sort of thing stops now, though."

"Well, obviously. See if you come up with anything while you're keeping watch, will you? I need to concentrate without interruption."

"Right you are."

But it was Severus who said into the silence, not long after, "It's 'this sort of thing' that's been making Regulus sick."

"He'd never. He couldn't," Evan protested.

"He'd never want to," Severus said slowly. "He'd never like it. Maybe even Bella couldn't make him do anything like this. But he's weak. Especially to her. She might be able to make him hold them. She could certainly make him watch. He'd do it, and not for canny reasons, but to please her. He might see it as a mercy to kill them after. Evan?"

Evan had been alternating between checks on Rabastan and sweeps of the horizon. He turned to the blanket. The girl's lips had been regrown, her hair cleaned of blood. Her face was much thinner, which meant it had been swollen before. He could see tears in her clothes, now, and how very muggle and ugly they were. The shirt was all dull, faded colors in awkward patterns, with the most basic, unadorned cylinders of the same cloth for sleeves, only coming down to her midriff in a way that had, against all odds, been _tailored_ that way and a collar that was only going to cover one of her shoulders no matter which way his poor embarrassed Spike tugged it. The trousers were the same heavy blue material as Evans's frock had been, but the bits around her calves (they didn't go lower than that) looked plastered on and Ev couldn't see how there would be enough material to stretch over, er, the more upper bits once Spike repaired them. Repaired either the trousers or the thighs, that is. Either were easier to look at than the girl's hands.

"Makes that month of detention Professor Kettleburn gave him for that thing with the jobberknolls seem quite lenient, in retrospect," Evan remarked.

"He got off expulsion by giving Slughorn the feathers," Severus reminded him levelly. "Muggles know that children who are drawn to that sort of activity often grow into adults who are drawn to this sort. It's a pity wizards are rubbish at correlation and causation. Evan?"

"We could send her home with an entire shirt and a pair of trousers that fit," Evan suggested. "Net benefit."

"That would create questions. This is what she owns. _Evan_."

"Mm?"

"Tell me you don't believe either of us, in Bellatrix's shoes, could manipulate Reg into begging us for the 'honor' of the coup de grace."

Evan's shoulders sagged. "No," he admitted, answering the real question. "No, she's not the squiggliest, but, no, you're right. That wouldn't be hard. Even Rodolphus might be able to make him, if she told him to. Spike, I think someone could make me want to, in Reg's position."

Severus nodded, shortly. He started running his wand over her multicolored, uglified thighs, crooning a singsong healing incantation under his breath.

Between watching that and thinking about Regulus, Evan was feeling a bit sick. He'd had uncountable fantasies, at school, about getting to watch or join Spike with someone else—Lucy Wilkes, Mingyue Chang, Ben Goldstein, and (for a very strange few months in fifth year) Remus Lupin being the most plausible contenders. It wasn't clear to him in retrospect whether part of the appeal of that image had been how utterly safe he'd obviously been from ever having to deal with the reality of it, given that other people _breathing_ near him put Spike's back up, or whether it had simply been one of those appalling things that comes and goes with puberty (like that humiliating fortnight after Spike had mentioned in passing how the castle statues could come to life in its defense and then Evan _couldn't stop thinking about them_. Statues. Light on statues. Chisels. Chisel-like features. Warm, wet sponges on white marble. Stone hands. White hands. Pestles. The David. Thousand-grit sandpaper on pale, moonlit skin. _Humiliating_ ) _._

One way or another, the fantasy had stopped frustrating him with its unattainability and slowly worn thin. Now watching Spike heal some muggle Evan knew he'd never met and didn't care a toss for was making him feel ill, just because of which bits were being healed. Not even because he knew how repelled Spike would have been by the whole business if he'd been letting himself have feelings. Ev wondered whether he was being ridiculous or this was normal, and whether he ought to speak firmly to himself or just feel glad that Spike had no patience with anybody and hadn't gone into healing as a career.

Of course, Spike had told him that formalities were redundant but was willing to look at spellbooks, and had apparently been in a silent jealous snit himself for months if not years. So in fact Ev was _obviously_ being ridiculous as well as useless, and ought instead to be on guard and thinking about hamstringing Rabastan.

"Did you confound her?" he asked after a while, because thinking about hamstringing Rabastan without getting Bella and the Dark Lord falling on their heads wasn't getting him anywhere.

Also because Spike did not respond well to the word 'confunding,' when he deigned to respond at all. He'd once thrown a book at Evan for using it. This had turned out to be because one of the protagonists was a worse grammar-fascist than he was. There were also far too many orchids, crass Americanisms, and gun-wands, and the author was a food-coquet.

"Unnecessary," Severus told him. "Lestrange isn't unconscious or dead; his imperius is unbroken. Nescio just creates a trance state, a pleasant unawareness. The message coming over her… channel of control is most likely very like the usual happy fuzz one gets from not fighting an imperius in any case. With the added benefit, for our purposes, that there's nothing for her to fight even if she knew how."

Evan digested this, and then translated from the Severan, "So she's completely stoned."

Severus sighed. "I'd prefer to think of it as a slight overdose of opium-based pain-numbing potion, if it's all the same to you."

"Stoned," Evan repeated reasonably.

"I could break the imperio now if you _want_ her hysterical."

"Did I say it was a bad thing?"

Spike muttered what were surely nasty comments about Evan's parentage, dress sense, and intellect under his breath as he bent back over the girl's hands. Evan grinned at the sky.

"Sod," Severus hissed after a little longer.

"What we are standing on," Evan supplied.

"All the books say not to give potions to muggles, but they don't go into the theory, and Slughorn became enormously uncomfortable with me for months when I asked, and it barely got better after I explained my mother's practice. All I got was a Statute of Secrecy lecture. I thought best not go asking around indiscriminately. Does your family and its history of muggle-hunting and other nastiness know? Tell me it's just a Statute rule. Tell me it's not the same as with nonmagical animals. Tell me a potion that works with a wizards' magical core will neither fail to work nor do something hideous."

Evan shrugged. "It's the same as with nonmagical animals."

"…But I _need_ to give her Skele-gro, Ev."

He didn't want to ask, but any reason for needing skelegro would not be easy for her to find an explanation for on her own. "Why?"

"Come and see."

Reluctantly, Evan did. Much against his will, he looked at the hand Severus raised for him. The thumb was sagging like a rubber sock filled with sand, its middle bone just gone. Rabastan had also melted a silver ring into her skin. Other than that it was a nice enough hand, if a bit on the spindly side for Evan's tastes. Had he been commissioned to paint it when it was well, he wouldn't have felt put-upon, or had to draw on the interesting-shapes side of his artistic brain.

He looked at it for a while. When he felt he could speak he said, levelly, "My anatomy expertise is a bit specialized." Spike was also, broadly speaking and with a few exceptions, better at magic, but bit people's heads off for saying so. Evan's included. "If you transfigure a replacement bone, I can charm it the right color so it won't show up wrong on those scans you say they have, and you can put it in."

"I can't make a living bone," protested Severus. "Not with functioning marrow of the right blood type, and nerve connections and all the tendons and ligaments in the right places, my god!"

Evan was sure Severus could, if he'd only stop obsessing about the details and just do it. He'd made plenty of entire live (grey) animals over the years, after all. Transfiguration was like that. Unfortunately, so was Severus, who had taken the reams of rubbish theory homework the Tartan loaded them up with _very seriously_ and then choked on the whole subject because the homework was, as aforementioned, rubbish.

This was not the time to have the argument, though. "Don't try to make it alive, then," he therefore said, nice and cool to soothe the fluster. "Make it so her body won't go mad around it, and sink it in and connect it up as best you can. We'll bespell it to deflect anyone noticing that it or pictures of it are really wrong, when they look. I'll put a geas on her to close a door on it before she lets herself realize it isn't working properly. Then their healers can do whatever can be done about the tendons and so on."

Severus looked at him, one of those long looks with everything changing under an unmoving face, a river in a tearing hurry under a thin layer of calm and utterly transparent ice. First it was protesting, panicking, appalled, especially about the geas, and then defeated as Severus failed to think of any better ideas. Then it wanted to touch his face, and then was oddly relaxed and peaceful and sort of smug for some reason, and then, with a short little nod, Severus got back down to business. "Can you fix the ring finger while I make the bone?"

"Mmm, I can separate out the metal, but you'd better take the finger itself. And if the silver doesn't respond to reparo, she'll have to have just lost the ring." He held out very little hope for the ring. Maybe if Dumbledore or the Dark Lord had had a crack at it (as if they'd lower themselves) the metal would spring back into form, but honestly he didn't think even Spike had much of a chance at a simple repair with this sort of damage. He'd have a go, though; if the ring had been beloved it would want to return to what it had been. Of the two of them, Evan would have a better chance at guiding it back to its original form.

Severus nodded again, and Evan bent over her hand while he picked up a rock and started poking it with his wand and frowning at it. "All right," Severus said after a while. "Bone-shaped object. How's the hand?"

"Half a tic," Ev replied absently, coaxing the last few scraps of silver out and away. " _Reparo. Psychometre refluctuo._ …No good, she'll have to explain that away on her own. It wouldn't have been a wedding ring or anything, would it?"

"Most likely not, in silver. It wouldn't be an engagement ring, either, unless you see a stone about. Whatever you think of her outfit, however, she's not in an income bracket that suggests a high probability of accepting a suitor who couldn't adhere to accepted practice. Of course, neither are you."

"I don't have a suitor, I have a yowling kneazle in a very tall tree with a bottle-brush tail, enormous claws, and technomanced-on wings," Evan observed cheerfully. Spike met his eyes and, despite everything, if he didn't actually smile, he unbent a little. Ev basked at him.

"Well, that's something, anyway," Evan went on, meaning that the woman wouldn't have to explain losing her wedding ring or anything like that. "Here, kitty, kitty: let's switch." It only took a moment for him to change the bone's color from birch-silver (not bad, for Severus; he'd half expected charcoal) to the proper off-white, but healing a flesh wound didn't take Severus any longer.

"Shall you etch the array?"

Evan scratched his nose with the side of his wand. "I don't mind, but you'd have to dictate; I was just going to do another runic charm."

"An array will give us better control of the results, and we can be more certain it'll last."

"No, I agree," he nodded, "only you seem to have something in mind and I've no notion what it is. Would it be quicker if you just did it?"

"…Maybe, but your handwriting's cleaner and that, Michelangelo. We _don't_ want any mistakes bringing the DMLE down on her."

"Carry on, then, Da Vinci," he said agreeably, shifting his grip on his wand.

Pausing only to make a face at him, Severus said, "Right, you'll need room for three levels. Outer boundary hexagonal, corners joined with a hexagram missing one set of parallel lines—do you want to etch all the lines before the runes, or work level by level?"

"Level by level, but slow down. …One set missing, all right."

"Starting there," Severus pointed to a compartment, "and moving deosil. Mercury, Earth-planet, naught, naught—"

"Do you mean naught the number, or nothing?"

"Blank, then. That's two blanks in a row, earth-element, blank, lucis…"

"What, as a word? Or is there a symbol I've forgotten?"

"L-U-C-I-S, or I would have said 'light-symbol.'"

"Now I see why you wanted me to do it."

"I will if you like; I habitually write smaller."

"No, no, I'll manage. You habitually write epileptic-spider-fell-in-the-inkwell."

"And that was why I wanted you to do it."

Evan grinned. "In English letters?"

"…No, Ev, you must write the Latin word in kanji."

"Just _asking_. Sometimes you get Hebrew and Futhark where you don't expect them in these things, you know. _And_ Arabic, _and_ Greek."

"…Yes, Romanic alphabet."

Evan couldn't quite work himself up to being smug about getting to be the right-first one, given what they were working on, but if you didn't stop to appreciate silver linings when they happened you'd spend your life green and not in the verdant-growth sort of way.

Twice Severus rose to check Rabastan and the moor as they worked, but all was quiet. When they had her hand looking like a hand again, he blew a long breath out and stated, "The narrative problem."

"…Er?" Evan asked politely.

"Memory and dream," Severus probably thought he elaborated. He went on to actually elaborate, "We can obliviate her, but there'll be nightmares. And she'll need an explanation for her lost time, possibly for her presence in this area depending where Ba—Les—Rabastan snatched her from, maybe for her ring. Then there is, I deeply regret to say, the point that anything we can learn from her, we may be able to use in satisfying Rabastan that all is, by his reckoning, well."

"All right, but where's our problem?" Evan raised an eyebrow at him.

"Our problem lies lurking in the moment of her becoming cognizant and either lapsing into medical shock or becoming hysterical. Especially if we ask her questions."

"…We could tell Bast to instruct her to answer questions and obliviate her before we end his imperius."

"Possible," Severus judged dubiously. It wasn't the _that won't work_ tone, it was the _we can do better_ one. "Put that on simmer—while we're on the subject, what _are_ we going to do with him?"

They looked at Rabastan's back for long moments, frowning. Ev tried not to notice the girl dreamily flexing her restored hand, and tried to feel good about it when he couldn't help noticing. Mostly, though, he was occupied with understanding for the first time why Severus sometimes just couldn't eat anything solid for a few days.

Words eventually floated out of his mouth, though he didn't really feel that he himself had formed them and wasn't even entirely sure where he was going. "Spike—I was never going to forget that thing earlier where you couldn't remember exactly what I'd said that made you sure you knew what I was thinking."

Severus looked at him warily. It wasn't one of his really suspicious looks, just your standard Severus Is Puzzled And Treats Ignorance Cautiously.

"Well," Evan told him, going gamely along with his own voice, "I hadn't said anything, and you _did_ know what I was thinking. And then there was that time you did whatever you did with Reggie when you were so tired and he walked in on us in the bathroom."

He watched Severus slowly-then-suddenly understand what he meant, and then he watched the protests form under his spare face. There was _What? Those were odd flukes,_ and _I hardly know what happened, let alone how to do it again,_ and _But you and Reggie are MINE_. Then Severus looked at the girl, obviously wondering if he could make a connection like that with someone he wasn't close to.

Then Evan saw him turn parchment-pale, and touch the lips no one had ever taken from him (that Evan knew of; he didn't think anyone had even turned his langlock spell against him) but that had once streamed a ghastly, symbolic white with magical soapsuds in front of half the school while he'd been in such half-clad disarray it had been more obscene than any willing nudity could have managed. In less than the space of a second, Evan saw Severus, the _moron,_ blame every one of those unspoken protests on cowardice, berate himself bitterly, and start screwing himself up to hurt Evan's Spike past bearing.

In the back of his mind, while the rest of him jumped to stop the idiot, Evan wondered whether he should call that stupid, _stupid_ part of Severus 'Seth Snape.' Only, that didn't feel right, somehow. What Mr. Snape had done to Severus wasn't something Evan planned to forget, or forgive, even if Spike himself was willing to draw a strong distinction between the father of his childhood and the one who apparently hadn't gone near a bottle in years (he'd hardly be the first wizard in history far too ready to soften to family where it wasn't healthy, after all). Ev wasn't exactly pleased that the man wasn't calling Severus by the name Severus had chosen to go by in his life.

Against all odds, though, the 'Seth' on Mr. Snape's lips hadn't felt or sounded like a diminishment, or even a rejection. That had sounded more to Evan like… less like a parent insisting 'whatever you try and whatever you do, you'll never be more than I permit,' than 'however you grow and however we fight, you'll never leave behind the boy I care about.' And if Spike didn't completely hate that, then even if it wasn't comfortable and even if Evan wasn't anywhere near ready to thank Mr. Snape for giving them books, it couldn't be wrong.

So maybe that part of him wasn't right for that name. It couldn't be Snivellus, because there was no such thing, ever, ever, _ever._ Whatever it was, Evan was going to kill it dead and feed it to Potter, who needed some to be a well-rounded person. He might not know how yet, but he'd do it, and in the meantime it could be curbed.

"You know what?" Evan waved him down before he could open his mouth to say he'd do it. "Stupid idea. I didn't feel you in my head, but Reg said it was almost like he and you were one person, and he definitely had a sense of you. We daren't risk putting you inside Bast's head, even if you could reliably manage it and even with obliviation available. This situation's far too delicate to experiment with."

Severus looked, for a moment, desperately, bone-quiveringly relieved, but then his jaw set and he pointed out, "It's the only idea either of us has had so far."

"Oh, you can confound him and I'll paint him a picture," Evan said airily. Then he blinked, and added, "You know, if we get enough from her, that might work!"

Not a canvas and oil picture, of course, it'd have to be illusory. They'd have to know what he'd done to the girl so Evan could put a sort of storytelling photograph before his eyes that would follow naturally from what had really happened. With only this much notice it wouldn't be in the least realistic, and Ev wasn't even sure he could make a moving illusion reliably opaque. He had, however, perfect confidence in Spike's ability to soften up Bast's credulity so that he'd fill in any blanks himself. Everybody remembered the Greenhouse Three incident, and Spike had never admitted to using any magic on Pettigrew, even to Ev or Narcissa.

Severus, though, looked amused. "Now you're just talking to talk."

Taking two fast steps to him, Evan struck, dropping down onto his lap with arms around his neck, kissing him. "You are not going in there," he pulled away to hiss, their foreheads pressed together. Severus always fitted the bridge of his nose into the low-slung dip of Evan's, and generally ended up with the tip of Evan's nose poking his lips. Usually that was comforting, but right now it only made him want to snarl more and _shake_ Severus for diving headfirst into the middle of a brainstorm, for not just saying _no, Evan, that wouldn't work and would also be pointlessly reckless, I have more self-esteem than to consider anything so crazy and damaging._ "Into neither of them. Should we find we have no other option but execution, _he vanishes._ "

"Narcissa's brother-in-law," Severus clarified, in a this-point-is-not-ignorable tone.

Evan shrugged indifferently. It wasn't as if Narcissa liked or would miss Bast. Even Reggie, who loved him in a low-key sort of way because they'd spent seven years fitting themselves around each other and Reg was even more of a squish than Spike in some ways, didn't exactly like him. "We've already decided the future would be better off with him nullified; we'd have done it by now if we were stupid."

"…How?" Severus asked. He was still effectively kissing Evan's nose, but there was a note of actual wariness now.

"I don't know how they," he waved at Rabastan, "are, presumably, doing it, and you don't need to know how I would, only that I haven't had to yet." He carefully kept his eyes off the thirsty, thirsty summer grass. "And that since my Rosier idea, as opposed to my Black one—and it's _your job to stop me when that happens, Naj_ —should actually work, if approached with care, I still don't have to."

Severus pulled back and looked at him carefully. "I've long since accepted the post of emergency stopgap,of course," he said slowly. "Yet. If you hadn't heart enough to send you mad. If you weren't bright enough and cold enough that your madness is simply a cutting to the bones of effectiveness. If you weren't swift enough to remind yourself of the benefits of moderation without my help every time, strong enough to pull yourself back, warm enough to want to…"

Now it was Evan's turn to look at him warily. "You're not telling me you _like_ it when—"

"It's unutterably disturbing," Severus assured him, "because efficacy and efficiency and the global good are hard to argue with, even when lashed about something that's a terrible idea, but you never let it _go off._ Every part of you that makes it happen, every part that stops it…" He shrugged. "Without even one of them, you'd be just another Black and I'd have no use for you."

"I don't," Evan said numbly. Numb wasn't the word—the opposite of it, really—only, every part of him wanted to be touching, and it was so uniform an ache as to overwhelm the everyday, ignorable touches of air and clothes. He didn't know a word for that. Nothing so self-absorbed as desire and couldn't be yearning, not when everything he could want was already his. "I didn't pull back on my own; I was looking at you."

Severus shrugged a little again and pulled him tight, hands running steady and firm over his back. "For years, I've been wishing you'd understand that formalizations of an existing state are redundant," he said, very low. "One flesh, still counts."

"Okay," Evan managed, mostly to prove he deserved to wear green, "but the spells aren't redundant."

Three fingers caressed down his throat. "Stubborn."

" _Right_ ," Evan corrected him with a cocky smirk. It seemed to be appreciated; Severus had a bit of a disadvantage at the moment when it came to playing unmoved. He also had the vial of Amborella, though, so this was entirely his own decision and he could live with it. "Come on, let's clean this lot up and go find you a book."

"Are you _sure_ we can't just kill him?" Severus asked plaintively, all the while giving him a hood-eyed look so scorchingly approving it made him bubble sheer to his toes.

"No," Ev admitted, "but you are. It's the second thing I don't understand, today. Killing him would be really convenient and probably save a lot of people a lot of trouble in the future, including us."

"I've explained why."

"Yes, you've come up with an excellent reason for keeping our hands clean that will pass with both of the people you need it to pass with. The thing is, I knew you would before I had the first clue what it would be. And I didn't know why, except you were going to want one, being you."

"If you really think—"

"No," Evan forestalled him hastily, cupping a hand around the back of his neck. "It's like with you and why you'd want me to be the one to kill you. Which is still morbid and creepy, by the way," he added, squishing noses with a smile so Severus wouldn't take that the obvious way. "You know that about me, I know this about you, it means that certain possibilities are more open than others. I just don't understand why."

Severus shrugged, and asked warily, "And the second thing?"

"You were just… completely fearless in that house, Spike," he said softly, rubbing down Spike's neck with admiring eyes he knew would make Spike deeply uncomfortable. "Bellatrix and Sirius are brave about Uncle Cygnus and Aunt Walburga; that's not what that was. And he used to hurt you. I know he did."

Scoffing, Severus shrugged his premise off, saying, "I was never _afraid_ of _Da_."

Evan gave him a soft, skeptical eyebrow. Mr. Snape was not a small man, and Severus had not been a big boy.

Severus made scoffing gesture. "I didn't _want him to hurt me,_ but he was never a real threat the way… the way other things are. Or not for long. The only thing I was really afraid of, once I could control my magic at all, was that I'd kill him and Mam would never forgive…"

They looked at each other for a minute.

Severus grumbled about psychopaths, various manipulative old bastards, hapless bloody damsels of all ages, and and smug, sneaky telepathic gits all conspiring to ruin his one free afternoon, and let him up.

His hand shot up to clamp around Evan's wrist, though, and he looked up at him again for a long moment. His eyes were full of somber calculation. Finally, he said, slowly, "It has long been said of predators that when first they 'taste blood' their metabolisms alter, and they can no longer digest milk."

Evan frowned, not sure he was entirely following. "Reggie—"

"Is a willing tool ill-used," Severus finished sharply. "Not a predator. Not in his nature, not in the core of him."

Evan frowned some more. "You aren't one, either, Spike, even if you've got Mulciber convinced you'd be good at it. You're more like a… a sheepdog."

"Thank you," Severus said, emerging from his own frown enough to be dry for a second. Then he caught Evan's eyes, intent. When he spoke it was slowly again, but this time it wasn't the hampered slowness of picking through eggshells but the measured pace of intensity. "But no. You're right. I'm," he stressed, "not."

He went cold clear to the bone. But Spike's eyes were only grave, there was no chill or absence there.

Ev saw, in his mind's eye, a yellow wood, its green grass swept away in places to form a thousand silver-pale paths. He saw brambles shoot up over some of them, waist-high and brambling, too thick to pass, as if they'd never been. Severus's grandfather was on some of those roads, so easy to get to. Rabastan was easy to stop.

Evan had barely parted his lips to protest and the golden leaves were shriveling.

Still watching him with that heavy gravity, Severus asked, "Regarding which subjects did the NEWT board write to commend me on my innovative performance and high scores?"

"Potions and charms," Evan said, and knew he was transparent and sullen and wrong. There was, though, surely, something fundamentally _unSlytherin_ about refusing to consider effective tools, so wasn't Spike wrong, too? "I got one about Arithmancy for my composition work," he felt the sulky, defensive urge to remind Severus, and knew he sounded just like Reggie. It didn't seem to him that getting those letters was all that uncommon, even if Slughorn had been over-the-moon in such an unsightly way about what a 'bumper crop' their year had been.

The mended woman was staring blankly at the horizon behind them in her awful clothes, but Evan could only see her in blood. In the door of the ancient hut, Rabastan sat, contented and fuzzy, not knowing he was waiting for shackles or a knife, humming a little to himself. There were long fingers steady around Evan's wrist, a thumb running lightly over his pulse point.

"It mentioned your use of runes in inkwork, as well, as I recall. Potions and charms and?" Severus insisted, gentle as the waves over a riptide, his voice low.

 _Defense_ , Evan stopped not-answering in silent defeat. Bella's magnificent, blazing, vital face was before his eyes, haughty and waxy, her hands stiffly graceful in a way not her own. In his ear was Spike's voice, just a little apologetic and a lot urgent: _I can cite you books or scrolls from every century with whole chapters about the sweet and sloping spiral of dark-arts dementia…_

"Evander," Spike called him, very soft.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes** : Re that whole names bit at the top: guilty. n,n
> 
>  **Trigger warnings** : offscreen rape and torture. Mutilation, graphic descriptions of wounds and (magical) 'meatball' field-surgery. References to HIV.


	69. Undisclosed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lord Voldemort is not amused and absolutely everybody can see where he's going with this. Only partly because Severus is, you know, super-duper hyper mega subtle. What? Jumping up and down and pointing frantically is totally subtle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : canon-typical pain infliction, references to rape, racism.
> 
> Bonus below. :D

_My elf died for this wizard,_ Regulus thought proudly, _he must be worth it._

Then the dark eyes left him and the Dark Lord prowled away to peer piercingly into someone else. Reg didn’t sag physically, but it was a near thing.

Severus had worked with him and worked with him and, being Severus, gotten more and more tangled up, trying to explain. He’d said things like, ‘Well, obviously you can’t not-think of a pink erumpent, but if you turn your mind sideways you can, instead, be looking at a sort of deformed peach-colored hippopotamus. With practice, perhaps, even a blue goat. Just put the right lenses over your eyes.’

Very helpful.  And it had just gotten worse from there.   “All you have to do is believe the things they want to be true,” he’d said. “Sprinkle the pictures you want them to see all over the obscuring smoke and let them wander,” he’d said. “Plant the dangerous thoughts underground and let the seeker walk over them, sifting through the rich world you make above,” he’d said. At the end of their mutual rope, he’d said, in a hanging-onto-sanity-by-his-toenails voice, “All right, just clear your mind and be a blank sheet the onlooker can fill.’

He hadn’t, in the least, said how to _do_ any of these impossible things, and Bella had just said to resist her, which was even more impossible and obviously not the thing to do because it would _show you were resisting_. Because Regulus wasn’t the least fortunate person in quite the entire world, however, Evan had come home during the tail end of one of Severus’s lessons in frustration.

He’d said, “I think he’s telling you to lie, Reg, just not out loud,” put his raincloak on the stand, and started trying to convince Severus that the kitchen would not burn down if he tried to make tea; no need for Spike to get up.

And Reg had stared at them both and screamed about an entire wasted month, very loudly, while Severus and Evan ignored him in favor of bickering about whether it was at all reasonable to expect anyone as terrible at lying as Severus to even think of putting it that way, let alone put any faith in anyone’s ability to make sense of such an arcane and impossible instruction. They were the only people Reg knew who could bicker while fully aware they were in a state of complete agreement.Reg was amazed his head didn’t explode every time Evan scolded Severus about ‘being too hard on my Spike’ when Severus had, in fact, been making excuses for himself.

Evan had talked Severus into a scowling inability to come up with anything else to say and Severus had stalked off into the kitchen to deny Evan the chance to make his own tea. They both seemed to think this was, as an outcome, satisfactory.

Bully for them. Reg did not find anything satisfactory about an outcome wherein he shrieked like his mother and the defenestration of his dignity was not rewarded by anyone so much as noticing he existed.

Of course, there were times when one preferred not to be seen, and this was definitely one of them. Meetings always had been, even before Reg had, as Spike would have put it, gotten an entire thestral tail in his throat over Kreacher.

Reg didn’t think he was wrong, though, and he more than half suspected that Spike didn’t, either. The kinds of things a move like that said about Lord Voldemort didn’t bear thinking of—literally.

It had taken Reg a while to cool down enough to realize that there was more to his outraged reaction than just _Kreacher’s been hurt,_ but there really was.  First of all, their leader called himself a lord but clearly didn’t have the first notion of what that had to mean.  He’d asked for the use of one of his follower’s servants—a servant who had no choice but to obey, who _was not his own_ and had never so much as met him, let alone given _him_ any loyalty.  Instead of giving that servant back at the end of the task, he’d thrown the life he’d been entrusted with away.

That wouldn’t have been completely unforgiveable on its own (at least, from a generic-pureblood standpoint; Reg’s standards on this subject were a little higher than that), but that wasn’t it by a long shot. Voldemort hadn’t told Reg that there was so much as a risk that Kreacher might not come home, let alone that his death was intended. Nor had he told Reg why a sacrifice was needed. So the Dark Lord’s followers were supposed to be eager to sacrifice blindly and without notice—to sacrifice vassals without notice, a short step to family—and be happy about it.

And that was bad. That was wrong, and made it clear that this was not a lord anyone with half a brain would be pleased to follow. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Well, Spike would have said it was the worst of it, but Spike was, not to put too fine a point on it, muggle-raised, With a chip on his shoulder. He’d adapted with determination and no one would know it to look at him these days (they’d know he was odd, but that was different), but he didn’t feel the importanceof things like blood and secrecy and tradition. Not the way even half-bloods raised in the wizarding world did.

Reg could see Severus was proud of being a Prince, whether he admitted it or not, but that was only because he’d read up on his ancestors and been impressed by some of them. He didn’t feel the weight of his family pressing warmly around him, pressing down on him. He felt his connection to the name he didn’t bear, but not his duty.

And according to everything Reg knew, he should have. Yes, of course, he shouldn’t have felt any responsibility to _the immediate members_ of his family; they’d all treated him horribly. But _the family_ , that was another question. Everyone saw Severus Snape clawing his way up every greased ladder and through every locked door put in front of him, but they usually assumed it was because he knew where he belonged: knew that making up the ground his mother had walked away from was, however impossible, what he had to do.

Reg knew better. He knew Spike was sensitive about Evan’s position, thought there was something despicable about the expected life of a wealthy pureblood and wouldn’t have taken it gift-wrapped, and mostly clawed because he got annoyed when people put barriers in his way. He did the right things on pure instinct and out of irritation, not because he understood what his responsibilities were.

And that was why allowing people in who’d been raised by muggles was a threat to the wizarding world: Spike was not normal. Even Evan freely admitted that, although Evan was more likely to look all sleepy and smug than to think about the implications (or at least, to show anyone he’d thought about them). Most people didn’t come in with the right instincts. They had too much to unlearn, and then they didn’t unlearn it.  

Spike’s instincts were, by on large, on-target, although they were usually at noisy war with other instincts, and he had learned. Reg remembered coming into school and gravitating to the shrimpy second-year, smaller than he was, who didn’t give a fig for his name and wasn’t keen to do him favors for the sake of doing favors, but was willing to help him learn what he was supposed to. So that Reg would be of help to the House, and because ignorance brassed Spike off and he considered asking for the kind of help that would allow a person to do better on his own to be laudable behavior.

(He’d actually used that word. Reg remembered staring at his face and slowly realizing, half admiring and half aghast, that he’d used it because it was the first one that came to mind, not to show off. Not at twelve; Reg hadn’t asked him about it until he was a lot more comfortable with Spike than he’d been in first year, but in his opinion fourteen was still not old enough to use language like that without specifically cracking open a thesaurus in a quest to sound impressive and grown-up. In Reg’s opinion, sixty was only old enough if you were a grandparent and had eyebrows like fuzzy white caterpillars.   Not that anybody _needed_ more evidence that Spike was a freak of nature, but there it was.)

Spike had learned, and he could pass, mostly, but when anyone ever actually asked him questions (this did not happen often, because he had a reputation and people _who had never met him_ knew better than to ask Spike even quite simple questions like ‘does it look like rain’), he’d either shoot you a cuttingly sarcastic look or answer honestly. All of Slytherin knew he thought, for example, that doing the work of one’s family if one was better suited for something else was stupid and the family would be better served by an employee who wanted to be there and was good at the job. He’d come right out and say things like that! But then he’d shrug and allow that logic very rarely got in the way of anyone doing what they felt to be their duty.

That was why he was all right; that was why even Reg’s mother had preferred using him to point out Siri’s shortcomings to telling Reg he wasn’t allowed to have a mudblood as a friend. He made sure he knew how the world worked, and if he didn’t like it he said so, but he understood he’d chosen to live in a tradition that had been refining itself since long before the Romans came and wasn’t going to re-form itself around his opinions. Even when he didn’t like something, even when he tried to change a person’s mind, he didn’t start with the idea that his ideas were more important than the veins of the land and the pulse of the centuries. He knew no one was.

Every pureblood knew that. Knew it without thinking about it, without knowing: just felt it. Even Severus, growing up mired neck-deep in the mud, with only his apparently-useless mother to connect him to his blood and his birthright, felt it.

Whereas, Reg had realized as soon as he’d gotten enough of his breath back to really think about Kreacher, the Dark Lord showed no evidence of understanding anything important.

And, all right, neither did Gilderoy, but that was because Gilderoy didn’t have much of a capacity for understanding anything. He wasn’t just not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he was a spoon that had been dropped in the jam and then on the carpet and then put back in the drawer to grow things. He might pretend to be sharp and think he was, but a blind wizard could tell he was mostly fuzzy. His untruths were charming, because no one was ever, ever going to believe a single thing he said about himself, whether he believed it or not, and you only had to be in his company for about five minutes to realize it.

Not only obvious that you couldn’t rely on what he said, but that he was just prattling because he had figured out that being pretty wasn’t enough to keep the attention of anyone worth cultivating for long enough to get them flirting back. He wasn’t dangerous. He didn’t think words meant anything. He didn’t think anything meant anything by other people’s standards of ‘means something,’ as far as Reg could tell.

Voldemort said all the right things, and when he said them, people believed he meant them and cared deeply. He left no one in doubt that his belief in the peril of the muggle taint, his opinion that anyone who wanted to fight it should be encouraged to do so, and by any means that suited them, was sincere and profound.

But he didn’t understand the things that purebloods didn’t have to think about. It wasn’t just that he’d treated a house-elf as if it was nothing, as opposed to being more valuable than most people. Or even that he’d assumed everything of Reg’s belonged to him and he could treat it as he liked.

No: he also didn’t seem to understand that Kreacher’s life hadn’t been Reg’s to give away.  Reg wasn’t Kreacher’s master: Reg’s parents were.  He’d been given to Reg’s mother, and she was the only one who should have been making any big decisions about his care and death.  Even Dad wouldn’t have done anything so drastic with Kreacher’s service, and the terms of their marriage technically, legally, and magically gave him the right.  Even _Granddad_ wouldn’t, and Granddad had been the elf’s master before Mother and Dad were married, had bred and raised him and gifted him to them. Kreacher would almost certainly have obeyed Granddad in anything without thinking twice, anything at all, but Granddad just _wouldn’t_ have.  

An argument could have been made that a parent might have a right to treat the elf of a son as if it were his own, assuming it ever _wasn’t_ just his own elf assigned to look after his son (which wouldn’t happen, if they lived under the same roof). Even the elf of a son-in-law, depending on what the marriage compact had been.

A really stupid Lord might assume the right to treat one of his vassal’s elves as his own, or as trash, and get what he wanted, if the vassal was the head of his own household. The vassal would at least be able to obey. He might well swear an Unbreakable Oath to avenge the insult to his House or die trying, but the thing could be done.

Reg might think of Kreacher as his for ordinary purposes, and that was true enough. For all ordinary purposes, Kreacher was his: the elf of his house, and more, the elf of the house he was heir to. But there was nobody, nobody who knew the first thing about either elves or the way a wizarding House worked, who thought that even a House’s heir would or could, while still living with his parents, be the true master of any house elf. Let alone of his family’s only elf.

Elves were _dangerous_ when their masters needed them to be. No Head of any household that had ever lived would allow an elf under their roof who could disobey them. Certainly no one would allow an elf to live with them who belonged to the person who’d inherit on their death.

And Reg knew that the Dark Lord was honestly confused on this point, because he neither expected retribution from the Most Noble And Ancient House of Black nor was surprised when Reg went unpunished by his mother.

Reg, in fact, had been so surprised that he’d broken under the suspense and brought the matter up one evening at tea (to reduce the likelihood that whatever punishment he got would last all day or be specifically tailored to make him miserable while sensible and more fortunate people were sleeping). He hadn’t actually admitted it was his fault that Kreacher was now pretending to be dead when any guests were over. He had, though, sort of hinted around that he knew he’d been careless and would not be surprised when she took him to task for it.

He’d been further astonished when all he got was yelled at. And it wasn’t about Kreacher. His mother fervently and vociferously agreed that he’d been careless, no room for doubt there. Without her actually saying as much, though, he’d been left with the distinct impression that Mother thought Bella was a blind fool, and Reg a weak one for being swayed by her.

It wasn't that Reg had expected Dad to intercede for him, but he’d gotten the impression that Dad actually agreed with Mother this time.   And that had gotten him thinking.

The thought he’d initially had was _that’s strange, usually the wizards around the Dark Lord’s age like him._ Only, years of Spike correcting his essays had kicked him in the back of his head and acidly chided him to be specific.

He’d failed to find any anything obviously useful in back-issues of the Prophet or any of the school publications (which sometimes survived as many as three years) and sat down (rather disgruntled) with Nature’s Nobility instead. After a frustrating hour poring over the by-birthdate index and also failing to find anyone who looked like the Dark Lord, he spent a further two charting the oldest Death Eaters and the older witches and wizards who pursed their lips and declined to comment whenever Bella started glowing and rhapsodizing.

Absolutely no one older than Abraxas Malfoy was in both the book and the Death Eaters. Even wizards who’d been Knights of Walpurgis once. And everyone at least as old as Eileen Prince (Regulus had known she’d be in there, intellectually, but had nearly fallen off his chair anyway) who was in the book and not in the Death Eaters pursed their lips.

He’d thought about going to talk to Mrs. Snape, but even if he’d known where she lived, it would have been awkward and he couldn’t risk it getting back to Spike. Spike was safe as Houses, but it would be unconscionable to tell him things he shouldn’t have in his mind, no matter how good he _might_ be. Reg had the definite sense that Spike had his own problems and was being careful not to dump them on Reg, so it was only right to take care of him back. Spike had always looked after him; it was about time.

And Reg definitely couldn’t talk to old Sluggy. Slughorn’s treatment of the Evans girl had made his politics quite clear, but the problem with Sluggy was that when you asked him questions that made him politically uncomfortable he dropped you. And Reg didn’t have the kind of exposure to him these days that would make winning him back easy enough to be worth it.

And when he’d thought a little more about Sluggy, and gone over his lists again, he’d realized that Bellatrix was the only Death Eater he knew who despised Severus. Oh, some of them _didn’t like him much,_ and many of them avoided him when they had no assurances that proximity to Narcissa would make him be polite, but that was an occupational hazard of being Severus.

Bella loathed him because he was a halfblood. Which was the same problem Mother and Uncle Cygnus had with him, although they didn’t feel, as Bella did, that a halfblood was a mudblood and actually even worse because _think_ about it. Everyone but Bella treated Severus like a Slytherin, if one of unfortunate family, because that was what Severus had decided he was and he took it seriously.

It was the scions of families that were the most like Mother’s branch of the Blacks that took Spike the least seriously and cared about his blood the most. And the British Death Eaters around Reg’s age from those families, like Mulciber, without exception had parents who were also Death Eaters, claimed with pride to be particularly close to the Dark Lord, and had been at Hogwarts between Mr. Malfoy’s and Mrs. Snape’s forms.

Which was downright strange.  Okay, Reg had heard that muggles only had a few years for having children, but they were _muggles._  Shorter lifespans, and no potions or native magic to keep them spry enough to keep up with a child, no fertility potions.  In almost any group of witches and wizards you’d find someone with a family member who’d had a child late in life, and everyone knew or was descended from _someone_ who’d hit a hundred without having an heir and panicked.  But no one he’d been at school with who’d joined them had parents older than fifty.  None of the Death Eaters he knew about were older than that.

Reg knew he didn’t know who everyone was, but Bella didn’t try very hard to keep secrets from him and the Lestrange brothers followed her lead. Bast didn’t care what Reg knew, anyway, and he knew different people. Reg was getting the distinct impression that the Dark Lord had had free reign to present himself to people as he liked through about 1960 or so, and then it had _really mattered_ what their parents had thought of him at school.

Except in Bella’s case, probably because no one could tell Bella anything. And in Reg’s, probably because everyone had preferred he get swept up by Bella’s bad ideas than Sirius’s.

 _Everyone admires Bella,_ Reg thought in wistful turmoil as the Dark Lord prowled back for a second pass, catching up his eyes again. _She’s so strong, she can do anything. I wish I were that strong but I just can’t keep up no matter how much I want to serve my Lord._

Because Spike had told him, “Don’t try to snuff out a feeling, it takes too long and will leave traces. Just dwell on an acceptable reason to be feeling it.” When Reg had argued that he could practice, Spike had said, “Everyone knows Regulus Black wears his heart on his sleeve. If you stop, you’ll draw attention to yourself. Besides, it makes you look weak and that gives you room to move while the Beaters aren’t bothering to pay attention. Remind me how many goals you made by taking advantage of your brother being irritated by me and Avery and protective of you?”

Which Reg hadn’t liked very much, but it seemed to be working: the Dark Lord looked between him and Evan and sighed a little, but moved on. He’d caressed Bella’s face and clasped Lucius and Rodolphus and that skinny foreign bloke on the arm; now he put a proprietary hand on Severus’s shoulder and very nearly smiled before moving to Rabastan.

To Reg’s eye, Spike looked like he was going to collapse into nervous hysterics after the meeting, but he didn’t think anyone but Evan or Narcissa would see anything but slightly-smug pride there. It was the lack of anything else that gave it away: Spike wasn’t distracted by other things going on in his head, or allowing himself to look at Luke (who seemed to be trying to look bored) or Reg or even Evan (who actually looked bored, or at least as though he was thinking about something else), much.

That is, Spike was looking at them all, but in little eye-flickers like a snake’s tongue, not his usual, long, I-see-everything-and-want-you-to-know-it once-overs, and not really more at them than at everything else. Therefore he was clearly putting it on and secretly petrified about something. Fortunately Mulciber, Avery, and Wilkes weren’t at this meeting; at least two of them might have recognized that behavior from the way he’d used to act in front of Sirius and his thug friends.

Rabastan, on the other hand, had an expression on that Reg didn’t recognize at all. And he didn’t want to. And he didn’t want to see the one on the Dark Lord’s face again, either, thank you.

Voldemort snapped, “Explain.”

“I was just muggle-hunting,” Rabastan muttered.

“Evidently not,” Voldemort said in a soft, cold, furious voice. “ _Crucio!_ ”

Reg hadn’t finished gasping before Spike had gone down to one knee and asked, “My Lord?”

“Yes, Severus?” Voldemort asked benevolently, holding his wand on the fallen, flailing, screaming Bast.

“Shall we withdraw while you discuss matters with Lestrange?” Severus asked, eyes firmly fixed on his own knee. Rodolphus, eyes wide with shock and cords standing out in his thick throat, cast Severus a grateful look. Reg would tell him later if his periphery hadn’t caught it. And if Evan was _actually_ not paying attention, although this seemed unlikely even if Reg’s cousin did rather look as if he’d gone deaf and was designing the prettiest butterfly ever in his fluffy blond head.

“No, Severus,” Voldemort said kindly, red light still crackling between his wand and Rabastan. “What use is error, if it does not teach?”

Severus went white and bowed his head. Reg saw him seek out Evan’s face, at its spaciest except for about a tenth of a second where Reg presumed there was eye contact before Evan drifted off again, and Luke’s, which had a withholding-judgment look. Finally Severus looked at Reg. He didn’t make mind-contact, but he didn’t need to. Reg could see what he meant.

And Reg did, in fact, understand that this was probably the future. Everybody did, he was sure. The Dark Lord meant them to. That, he thought, was why people like Tim Avery and Thor Rowle and Lucius’s peons Prawn and Boil or whatever they were called weren’t at this one. No one here was stupid, and the simplest one was Rus Lestrange, who’d follow Bella’s lead.

Everyone, he was sure, was going to be _extraordinarily_ careful until they were dismissed, in case the Dark Lord had planned to make more than one example.

“Now,” Voldemort lowered his wand with a very slight crooning note to his voice. It reminded Reg a bit of Severus at his most sweetly poisonous. Bella tried to do that sometimes, but she usually overshot it. By a mile. “Would you care to explain your ineptitude to your fellows, Rabastan, or shall I?”

Reg didn’t know whether he was desperately hoping Bast would show enough strength to answer or would have the sense to keep his occasionally smart mouth shut. He hadn’t gotten his breath back, though, before the choice was taken from him. Maybe he hadn’t even heard the question, in the blissful shock of the pain going away.

“Perhaps it is my fault,” Voldemort said to everyone over Rabastan’s whimpering gasps, walking slowly around him. “in trusting such young, hot-blooded wizards as you, my devoted, with a free rein.”

Reg saw Severus’s still face flush and pale. Someone who’d been called a bat and a vulture and a greaseball so many times, Reg thought, shouldn’t mind being called a fiery steed. There was nothing wrong with horses. But Spike had been known to take offense at ‘good morning.’

“I see now it was foolish of me,” Voldemort continued, still walking around Rabastan with a measured pace. “But who can blame me, my young friends? For there is not a one of you whose parents are not known to me.”

Reg managed not to look at Spike, but he and Evan were the only ones. Lucius looked pleased and relieved, but Bellatrix’s head had jerked right around. She was staring, caught between outrage and revolted hauteur and what Reg could only call a should-I-reconsider face. Evan’s gaze had drifted off in the Dark Lord’s direction, and Reg, with a shiver, thought it had hardened for some reason. Then Evvie was just Evvie again, which made Reg remember that some of the girls in his form had thought his cousin was almost as creepy as Sirius thought Spike was.

“Not one,” the Dark Lord repeated, “and those few of you whose parents have not the sense or breeding I could wish in my Death Eaters have well surpassed them.”

Lucius was definitely looking relieved now, and he risked sliding Severus a smile. Severus smirked back and his hand flashed: L-E-G-A-C-Y / O-N / L-A-U-R-E-L-S.At first Reg thought Lucius would either be amused or take offense. After a moment, though, the grey eyes slid to Rabastan, quiet now but twitching and biting through his lip, and Lucius’s lips pressed together in grim thought.

“My faithful, I believed, had raised each other well. Surely you could be trusted with freedom, surely you would be responsible.”

Everyone was very suddenly and visibly hating Rabastan now, especially his brother. He’d looked up, seeking a friendly face, and the best he was finding was cool reserve. Reg tried to put some concern on his own face, for his old friend’s sake, but really, the last thing he needed was to be under more observation. His mother was always watching him for signs of being-Sirius, and Bella for weakness, and Narcissa never stopped keeping an eye out for ways to horn into his private life, and, well, Spike even worried about people he didn’t like.

Reg was mostly okay with most of that, although it was all annoying and, in Bella’s case, dangerous. His family cared about him, and some of them cared about him in an active way that meant they paid attention to him. But this wasn’t a good time to have eyes on him, not when he needed so badly to know things that he really, _really_ didn’t think the Dark Lord wanted anyone to know.

Severus would have asked if Reg really needed to know things or just that felt he did. While Reg did know the difference, he’d taken a respectable NEWT in Divination where Severus had given it up when he found out it didn’t make logical sense. Divination was about being aware of what you knew before you knew why you knew it. He might not have put all the facts together yet, but his family—even his remaining family—was split right down the middle about the Dark Lord, and there had to be a reason for that. There had to be a reason that the only Blacks who approved of Lord Voldemort didn’t know who he was, in his blood and his history. That the ones who did were stiffly appalled that their children wanted anything to do with him.

And then there was that cave. He hadn’t gone back alone (not only, if he was honest with himself, because Spike had said not to or because he didn’t want to make Kreacher see the place again), but he remembered enough about it—the shape of it, the bleak, bouldery beach, the black cliff it emptied, the mostly-natural rock salt formations, the old, old feel of the magic—that he didn’t think it would be quite impossible to find out what it was.

It wasn’t just the repository of Voldemort’s secrets and his fallen enemies, Regulus was sure about that. If Severus didn’t know what a potion was, odds were that no one had known its name for centuries; he was _that_ kind of swot. The boat and the basin had definitely been made by different people with quite different tastes: the boat was gothic and, while frankly morbid, had reminded Regulus a bit of Hogwarts, while the basin and its dipper were natural and clean, if stern and forbidding as they shone in the dark.

Even the most basic things about the place drew Regulus to the same conclusion.  The cave’s opening was undisguised and unadorned and unapologetically female in its shape, which was in no way the Dark Lord’s style. Using places that throbbed with ancient magic was; Severus and Evan were the only people who never looked nervous about anything but the Dark Lord during meetings (although Reg suspected Spike of a touch of bravado about Bella and Evan’s face was not a fantastic guide to his comfort level), and Lucius sometimes seemed downright itchy.

The great, transparent blocks of salt that covered every inch of earthly stone, painted black by the deep shadows of the sunless cavern, had to be natural. They looked ancient, at least, and Reg knew instinctively that Evan would have gone happily wild over them. He’d have gone in with his easel and not come out till Spike dragged him. Which suggested to Reg that they were not something Voldemort could have dreamed up, no matter how otherworldly they made the place look.

Then, none of the dead things in the lake were very old.  The water was so salty and lifeless that even their clothes had been preserved, and all the clothes Reg had seen had been relatively modern, nothing he didn’t see living wizards wear on the street (although, in some cases, not very often wizards his own age who weren’t attending formal events as a family duty).

A vast cavern of water and salt that made Reg’s skin crawl but hadn’t seemed to bother the cauldron-botherer with him much, that had to be entered through a comparatively narrow crack and unlocked with blood, whose only purposeful feature was a bowl. A bowl on a hidden island, which was the light in the dark.   A bowl of a powerful drink that couldn’t be wasted to be emptied, which according to Kreacher had to be emptied thirteen times,[1] which when drunk renewed itself.  There were twelve months in a year, but thirteen moons by the old count, thirteen sacred trees. Then there was the feel of the magic—Reg could tell the difference between something that had been bloody and cruel from its conception and something pure that had been corrupted. The cave had been a place of healing and renewal once; he felt it in his marrow.

Altogether, he was sure Severus had been right: that cave had first been made a place of power by druidesses. That, along with the rarity of a black cliff, gave him a place to start looking. He had to know what Kreacher had been meant to die for, and so he had to know what that potion was. If Severus couldn’t figure out what it was in the lab, Reg would have to look from a different direction.

And he really, _really_ didn’t need anyone looking at him while he did. Particularly not someone who could read his mind at will, who Bella would tell anything to, who his parents loathed, who had tried to kill his elf, who he really couldn’t, practically speaking, avoid.

Voldemort wasn’t looking at him now—his gaze had passed over Reg’s face once or twice, but Reg was just gazing down at Rabastan with a troubled expression, and this was evidently satisfactory.

Of course, he had been listening, if only with half an ear. You didn’t survive growing up in Mother’s house without learning to do that. But you also didn’t survive growing up in Slytherin with Severus without learning to not-hear all the extraneous and insulting words that were confusing what someone was really trying to tell you. As Reg understood matters, what Bast had done wrong boiled down to ‘underestimating a muggle.’

There was a lot more to it than that, though; had to be. Voldemort had never objected before when the older Death Eaters ran a Wild Hunt, or even when Luke and Rus did one on their own. Bella had never gotten in trouble over the ‘training sessions’ she held to toughen Reg up and keep her family’s skills sharp for when Voldemort needed them. Mulciber and Avery and Rowle, as far as Reg knew, had never gotten more than a sharp injunction to be careful no matter how many Muggle shops they went into to curse the funniest thing they could think of bloodthirsty. And none of them did any particular research, as far as Reg was aware, to make sure their victims were safe targets and completely magic-free.

So maybe it was just that Bast was the first one to be caught unawares. Which he certainly had been. The muggle girl he’d been, as the Dark Lord had put it, disporting himself with, had fought him tooth and nail until he’d put her under Imperius, just like any muggle would do. But then, when he’d taken the spell off her to hear her scream as she died, she’d cursed him.

Not any curse a wizard would use, or even call a curse, really. She’d just spat at him the fervent wish that his bollocks would crawl into his body and die. Apparently, they’d smartly proceeded to do exactly that.

Bast had tried to keep it hushed up by using his family healer rather than going to St. Mungo’s and then obliviating the man, which the Dark Lord said was the only piece of sense he’d shown in the whole affair, apart from cleaning up after himself. And the healer had stopped Bast dying of gangrene or anything awful like that, but, as the Dark Lord had put it, when it comes to the Dark Arts, what is done is done, and even an untutored mudblood’s accidental magic could leave a real curse scar, especially when it was a dying wish spoken in blood. Bast would not be a flowering branch on the Lestrange family tree, even if he could wring a way to make him feel like a man again out of the healers.

Reg hoped his own parents didn’t find out about it. As their only acknowledged child and the only male of his generation who was still on the Tapestry and had the name of Black, he’d be the recipient of their reactionary panic on the subject of withering branches. And he hadn’t yet met anyone he thought he could live with who hadn’t already married someone else. There certainly wasn’t anyone he was interested in (in any long-term way) who’d look at him twice and see anything but the Black heir.

Later, when he’d declined Spike’s usual silent invitation to come have a nerve-settling tea-or-nightcap in Dye-Urn in favor of taking the humiliated Bast to get drunk (and rolled his eyes over how pleased Evan was failing not to look about having Spike to himself, as if they hadn’t just had a whole week more less alone), Bast bitterly complained, “You’d think I’d been punished enough.”

“Yeah,” Reg sympathized. “I think he’d planned to find someone to lace into, Bast. You just had rotten timing.” Privately, he winced. ‘Rotten’ had perhaps been the wrong word to use.

Bast didn’t notice. “I don’t see what his problem is,” he said. If Reg had said that, he knew people would have said he was whinging, and in Spike’s mouth it would have come out as a gripe. Bast gave the impression that he simply disliked being confused. “All right, so I didn’t do a bloody background check. Neither does anyone else. It isn’t as if there’s anything wrong with having a bit of fun with a muggle. They’re going to die anyway. May as well make them useful.”

“I got the impression he doesn’t see where the fun is,” Reg offered.

“Yeah, well, he’s a dried up old…” Bast’s voice dried up, itself. Rather like other bits of him.

“I don’t really see it, either,” Reg admitted. He wasn’t heaping coals on, and he wasn’t trying to start a fight even if Spike would have said it was a good thing to do for someone who was all curled up and paying attention to how low they were feeling.  Just, there was no accounting for taste, and some people’s tastes were more unaccountable than others. “I mean, muggles. Ick.”

“Well, they have the same kinds of bodies as people,” Bast explained, “but they aren’t. So you can do things you wouldn’t do with people. It can be very interesting. Anyway, you sleep with Gildy, sometimes.”

“Well, he’s loony,” Reg explained, “and tedious sometimes, but he’s still a _person._ I know who he is. He’s soothing, once you get over expecting him to act like normal people. And he’s funny, and he doesn’t want anything complicated from anyone. And he likes spending time with me.”

“Because you flatter him,” Bast droned.

“Right,” Reg nodded, smiling. “I know what he likes and I give it to him and he’s happy and then gives me what I like because he wants to. That’s called I’m talented and everyone has a good time. Anyway, I think he’s been lonely since school.”

“Right,” Bast said bitterly, taking a long drink of his Ogden’s Old Peculiar (Spike not only curled his lip at that drink but called it a Colonial boilermaker. Reg did not feel Bast needed to be aware of either of these facts). “Blacks are always perfect. And brilliant. And—”

“Just Bella and Narcissa,” Reg said mildly. “And only because they enjoy being terrifying. The rest of us are allowed to be human. Except at parties and formal dinners and like that, I mean.”

“Human? Your cousin’s a freakshow,” Bast snarled. “Did you see him back there? I thought he was going to start humming. Or pull out that bloody sketchpad of his.”

“Oh, Evvie’s all right,” said Reg. “He wasn’t enjoying himself, Bast, honestly. Sometimes when he doesn’t like what’s going on he… stops paying attention to it, if there’s nothing he can do.”

“Vacuous sod,” Bast grumbled, but his shoulders had settled once he’d satisfied himself Reg was telling the truth.

Which Reg wasn’t, quite, but it was at least true that he highly doubted Evan had been enjoying Bast’s suffering. “He can be,” he admitted.

“I don’t know how he and Snape stand each other.”

This, Reg thought, was an odd tangent, considering that Severus had traded on a moment of favor to try and buy Bast some privacy. But if Bast was in this kind of a mood, pointing that out wouldn’t help. Reg didn’t want to get into it, so he just shrugged.

Bast scowled down into his drink as though something other than the obvious was bothering him and he couldn’t put his finger on it. He shook his head as if to chase the thought away, and took a gulp.

“What are you going to do?” Reg asked softly.

“You think Snape could find me a cure?” Bast asked morosely. “You’re pals with him. He’s all about making up spells and doing weird things with cauldrons. I don’t want to ask someone who’d ask the wrong questions. I’d pay.”

“You could always say you’d been dueling,” Reg pointed out. “They won’t investigate if there weren’t any Unforgiveables involved and they can’t connect you to any Wizarding deaths and no one presses charges.”

“There was one involved,” Bast snapped.

“You don’t have to tell them that. If you’re the one coming in hurt, they wouldn’t assume _you’d_ used one.  Unforgiveables tend to stop people, after all.”

“Will you ask him?”

Reg hesitated. Spike, he knew, didn’t like Bast any more than Bast liked him. Possibly less. Which was to be expected, really. Cobras would warn you what you were letting yourself in for until you left them no choice but to prove they didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘bluff’ (or see the point), whereas it was the word ‘warning’ that side-stabbing stiletto snakes didn’t understand. Real, legless Atractaspinidae didn’t have to open their mouths to bite, and real spitting cobras would only strike as a last resort, except to eat. You couldn’t expect a pair of Slytherin snakes like that to respect each other, and Bast and Spike mostly rubbed by through the very effective means of not talking to each other even at parties, even to ask for the condiments.

More, Bast was right. Spike _was_ all about coming up with interesting magical solutions to problems. Reg had half expected him to approach Bast—or, at least, to approach Rodolphus—right after the meeting and offer to look into it, no matter how much he and Bast usually stayed out of each other’s way. Just because the problem was unusual.

He hadn’t. He’d just offered Reg an invitational eyebrow and, when Reg had shaken his head minutely, exchanged a little eye contact with Lucius, grabbed Evan’s arm, and apparated out before anyone could try to talk to him. And avoiding everyone, going to tuck himself away were there were no capital-P curled-lip revolted-italics _People_ was exactly what he’d meant to do. He’d had that jittery look. His face had been as cool as it usually was in public, but if you knew him you could see it in his shoulders.

“He’s been frustrated with me,” Reg hedged. “For not making the kind of progress in Occlumency he thinks I should. You know how he gets when he’s tutoring.”

Bast rolled his eyes. “Everyone knows,” he agreed. “But…” He trailed off. At a guess, Reg would have said that was probably about not wanting to admit that a mudblood who was thoroughly uncharmed by him was among his best hopes, or just not wanting to admit he was feeling desperate.

“I won’t ask him for you,” Reg said. “That’d just get him looking down on both of us. But if it looks like he’s having a receptive moment I’ll lay out your position.” Bast nodded, looking relieved, and Reg added, “You should try St. Mungo’s first, though. You could avoid telling them anything, really you could, especially if you point out you’re related to Aunt Drusilla, and they’ve got a whole research department.”

“You know who they’ve got on their research department?” Bast demanded, in a tone that meant yes, Reg did, and was being dim about it.

“Severus,” he replied, in much the same tone. “His lab’s specialized, but that’s the quality—”

“ _Rookwood,_ ” Bast explained, with a shudder.

“Isn’t Rookwood an Unspeakable?”

“Is he? I hadn’t heard that. Lucius says he’s in St. Mungo’s more often than the Ministry.”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Reg said, interested. “But then, every time his name comes up, Severus turns weird, angry colors and Evan changes the subject.”

“Well, we’re not supposed to know who Unspeakables are,” Bast said, with a touch of disdain for the Ministry’s ability to keep secrets. “He’s probably working part-time with St. Mungo’s as a cover. Considering what Rus says he got up to at school…”

“Well, that’s a point,” Reg conceded, also shuddering a little. “Still.”

“I don’t know…”

“It’ll be worlds easier to get Aunt Drusilla to keep horrifying people off your treatment team than to get Severus to pick up a new problem when he’s already feeling overworked,” Reg pointed out. Ordinarily he would have suggested Lucius or Narcissa for that, but Narcissa was at best lukewarm on her in-laws, and Reg didn’t consider that the odds of Lucius leaping to help someone who’d just been Made An Example Of were very good.

Bast glared morosely into his drink. “I want a shag,” he announced, miserable and furious andin a rather louder voice than they’d been using.  A couple of witches at the table near their booth waved at him and burst into giggles.  Their friend looked disgusted and made a comment Reg couldn’t hear.

Reg rubbed Bast’s shoulder sympathetically, and called for another round.

 **Next:** July 31, 1980. Lammas Eve in the roses: it’s only the start of a long night.

 **Notes** : My thinking about the cave was influenced by the HBP movie, the inimitable whitehound, and various Celtic lore sites around the net. Probably Red Hen Publications, too, because it usually is, although I don’t recall how specifically in this instance.

* * *

 

[1] A careful reading of the chapter The Cave in HBP shows that while Harry counts twelve goblets of green potion, he doesn’t include Dumbledore’s first drink in his count. Dumbledore toasts Harry and drinks, and drinks three gobletfulls ‘in silence.’ Harry calls the goblet after these ‘the fourth,’ but Dumbledore’s first draught was not a silent one. (This observation brought to you by someone to whom the ground floor and the first floor are the same thing, who gets suspicious when a four-story building only goes to the third floor.  WHAT ARE THEY DOING ON THE FOURTH FLOOR?!?!?!)

* * *

 

 **Bonus** : The Death Eaters Occlude On Command!  
Brought to you by potionpen’s beta psyche_girl, who commented: “Evan’s method of Occlumency: think about the precise shade of the elephant’s pink chiaroscuro so very, very, very hard that everyone else gives up and goes home. XD XD XD EV YOU ARE MY FAVORITE!!!”

Lord Voldemort: Pink elephants are now anathema.  Banish them from your thoughts.

Lucius: ...Oooo-kayyyyy.  Whatever, I have bribes to arrange.

Bella: DEATH TO ALL PINK ELEPHANTS! WE WILL BANISH THEM FROM THE **_WORLD!!!!_**

Rabastan: Pink elephants might bleed in an interesting way.

Rodolphus: What?!  Why can’t we think of pink elephants?!  I was planning to go hunt some and make something neat from the tusks!  Would they still be anathema if it was only bits of them because they were dead?

Regulus: I am totally not thinking about pink elephants at all!  Is that okay?  Does that count?!  No one’s explained how not to think about pink elephants, I mean, maybe they did and I didn’t get it…?

Wilkes: Oooh, elephants, that’s so phallic and romantic in a jungly safari ivory way.  The grey ones don’t clash with everything, of course.

Evan: Actually pink isn’t a real color, at least, it’s not on the light spectrum, so just like blue is usually an illusion, pink in animals, like people, is probably more a question of red blood under pale skin… of course the thickness of the skin would be as much of an issue as the melanin level, and also what color mud or dust the animal had been tramping through…

Narcissa: It’s just as well; elephants of any color seldom blend harmoniously into the drawing room.  Now, if only we could declare candied pineapple to be an anathema.

Severus: #$%#$@(ing kids and their #%@#*@ing self-destructive stupidity; I had to stop three cauldrons blowing up today, %#(*&$ing Dumbledore and his #$@#*)@#!$#*&ing arbitrary so-called rules and alleged enforcement thereof, but HAHAHAHAHA essay due Friday, just you WAIT, you thoughtless, careless, frenetic little weasels…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : July 31, 1980. Lammas Eve in the roses: it's only the start of a long night.
> 
>  **Note** : My thinking about the cave was influenced by the HBP movie, the inimitable whitehound, and various Celtic lore sites around the net. Probably Red Hen Publications, too, because it usually is, although I don't recall how specifically in this instance.


	70. July 31, 9:00, Rosier Hall, Eversley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three hours till Lily's prophecy-free, a storm's coming on, and Severus can't get out of making nice at the family picnic.
> 
> Lammas Eve in the roses: it's only the start of a long night.
> 
> (He should probably consider putting his shoes on.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : speculations on intrafamilial usage of the Dark Arts.

July 31, 9:00, Rosier Hall, Eversley

“My stars,” blinked Evan’s mother. “Severus, dear, this is most unlike you.”

When Severus’s shoulders (inevitably) hunched, she continued, serenely, as though she hadn’t noticed. “It’s not a criticism, dear, but you must admit that it _is_ unlike you to bring a loaf that you haven’t kneaded yourself with your own hands. Most particularly to Lammas Eve Tea.”

“I’ve been busy,” Severus muttered from behind the outer strands of his hair. It wasn’t the entire curtain, at least.

“Yes, one might almost hope he’s learning moderation,” Evan said cheerfully, bending in to give his mother an air-kiss. “Or at least delegation, by which I mean ‘what shops are for.’ You can even give it pretty good odds that this year the bread doesn’t have chili peppers in.”

“They were _cherries,_ ” Severus scowled exasperatedly, “I just put a few drops of Scotch bonnet juice in the infusing syrup to give them a modicum of character. Don’t be a baby.”

“I dunno,” Evan said, grinning, “I could do with a milk bottle, I think my mouth is still on fire.”

Severus kissed him with a _there, your mouth is quenched, be satisfied_ air. Evan stayed to nuzzle. He knew Severus would melt eventually—yes, there it was, there was the lean-in, and hands sliding up his back. Mmm.

“And what fruit have you brought me?” Callisto asked in a patiently-tolerating-them voice, presumably when they’d ceased to be endearing and become dull and/or embarrassing.

Ev pulled back with regret. Quite a lot of regret, actually. He’d got Spike to look a bit hazy, even blurred the bland line of his lips a little, and he was all warm and smelling of spices and sun on the leaves. Could they get away with _Well, there’s the loaf, here’s the bottle, nice to see you, Mum, must be off?_ Probably not.

“Actually, we ended up reversing who brought what this year,” he said.

“So I didn’t have to shop for bread at all,” Spike agreed cheerfully, making ‘shop for bread’ sound like ‘slog through muggle sewers’ although the bakers in Diagon were a perfectly lovely pair. “I suppose you could call that delegation.”

“I’ll call it a reasonable first step,” Evan laughed.

Severus pulled a bottle out of another of his demon pockets. “Bilberry wine,” he announced, “which I did make.”

Evan’s mum looked at it. She had an expression Narcissa sometimes got around Severus, which Evan had learned meant that her forehead really, _really_ wanted to wrinkle but she was refusing to allow it to do so.

In this case, he assumed it was because of the color of the wine. It was red, but more the color of strawberry syrup than like red wine. Bilberries were the color of blueberries: a blue nearly black.

“I understood bilberries to be traditional for Lughnasadh,” Severus said defensively, naturally assuming, because he was Severus, that she found the wine unacceptable, as opposed to inexplicable.

“Gracious,” Ev’s mum remarked in mild astonishment. “I do believe he pronounced that correctly.”

“Severus does _research,_ ” Evan said proudly, snugging Spike’s arm. “Do you want to give it a go?”

“Certainly not,” she said firmly. “I’m perfectly happy to stop at ‘Lammas,’ and have a civilized picnic without any mountain-climbing or clogging up wells. Although I’m sure,” she added, with more ambition than real hope, “that if you two wanted to undertake a traditional trial marriage—”

“Mum,” Evan said firmly, clamping down harder on Spike’s suddenly shrinking arm. The jumpy retreat was much less depressing than it would have been a few days ago, but damage control was still required. “Even you don’t want a spur of the moment do with no trappings and no one here.”

She made a brief, concessionary moue. Severus didn’t relax all the way, though. Of course he didn’t; Ev had only won a temporary retreat from her. She’d confirmed her position on a Large Expensive Overblown Public Wedding, which, if not Severus’s worst nightmare, was certainly up there on his list of top twenty night terrors.

Ev pressed his advantage by changing the subject. “Isn’t Dad here?”

“No, dear, he’s Out With Some Of His Friends,” she said, letting her gaze drift lightly to Severus’s left arm. Evan shifted his foot slightly, where his own tattoo was, and she nodded a bare millimeter.

Severus looked deeply annoyed. “What a pity,” he said, and he very clearly meant it a lot.

Ev’s mum looked charmed. “I’ll tell him you were sorry to have missed him.”

“Do,” Severus said graciously, although Ev could tell that wasn’t what he’d meant at all.

“Shall we?” Ev’s mum asked, holding out her arm. Evan took it.

Severus let go of Evan long enough to take off his shoes and socks and roll his cuffs up and pack the bread and wine into the picnic basket Ev’s mum had met them with. The shoes and socks disappeared into a pocket. Taking Evan’s arm again, he closed the door behind them on the warmth and light of the Hall.

Ev’s mum looked startled. “Won’t you be wanting your shoes, dear?” she asked delicately. “I can’t answer for the roads, and it’s so dark out. Your feet will be cold, even if it is a breath away from August.”

She had a light floating before them, but it was awfully dark—deeply overcast, with wet, heavy, clammy air and not a star to be seen. Tradition was tradition, but it wasn’t a very nice night for a midnight picnic. Severus would probably be comfortable enough; he had to be exhausted before he lost control of his temperature; but he was still at risk for stubbing a toe or stepping on a sharp rock.

Severus looked embarrassed, but he shook his head determinedly. “I wanted to take them off last year,” he said, starting them off on their walk around the grounds, “and now I think I know why.”

“…Oooh,” Evan breathed after a moment, his eyes widening. “Is this because—”

“Yes.”

Ev’s mum made a quietly curious noise, nearly subvocal, and Severus’s hand made a sort of shrugging go-ahead motion under his. So Evan did explain, about meeting Mrs. Prince and Mrs. Longbottom at the conference, and about finding out that Mr. Prince had the same sense for ley lines that Severus did.

“A bloodline talent!” Ev’s mum exclaimed. Ev could hear the matriarchal greed in her voice. “Of course there are talents that run in families like the Black and Rosier talents for politics and art, which can be taught—”

“Usually,” Evan murmured, thinking of Reggie and Sirius and Bella, and one or two of his cousins on the Rosier side whose training had run aground long before they were allowed to work with watercolors, let alone oils.

“—And it’s very nearly de rigueur for vibrant hair or eyes to run in magical families, but inborn magical gifts like Parseltongue and the green thumb are quite out of the common way.”

It really was awfully hypocritical of her, considering how hard she’d fought having a child herself, he felt, to be so set on his securing the bloodline now-now-now. Spike was right, really; she was still young, as witches went.

Well.  Young enough to be fertile, anyway.

If what she really wanted was to make sure her son wasn’t the last Rosier of her husband’s line, there wasn’t any reason Ev knew of that she couldn’t have given him a sibling. Why did she have to start traumatizing—er, pressuring him and Spike right out of school?

(Come to think of it, why did she? Because she really had started badgering them, very nearly _right_ out of school. Actually, she’d pressured _Evan_ about his duty to hunt for a spouse before he’d started studying for his OWLs. Hmm. Well, this wasn’t the time to look into it, but maybe it needed looking into.)

As well as the genetic covetousness from his mum, he could feel Spike’s spine snapping straight in revulsion. Poor Spike, Ev thought; he wanted to be a Prince without being connected to Severus Prince, who had refused to be connected to him. And he thought he’d taught himself not to want things he couldn't have, so it was hard for him.

“I don’t know about that,” Spike said stiffly. “But hearing that someone else has… that sort of a feeling for… those energies makes me somewhat more inclined to believe I’m not imagining it.”

“Of course you’re not,” Evan said fondly, leaning in to kiss his cheek. “You’re completely objective about everything.”

Severus side-eyed him blandly. “Not quite,” he said in his most boring, clinical voice. “There are one or two areas in which I’ve decided against attempting objectivity, as being both hopeless and beside the point.”

Evan shut up. He couldn’t hug himself or snog Spike because his mum was there and both his arms were occupied, but the fizzing in his chest went out the top of his head and down clear to his toes and burned away the humid night air.

They walked in silence for a while, smelling the rain coming on. Evan could feel Spike comfortable and content on one side of him, feeling the earth under his the bare soles of his feet, white and shining against the choked summer night, happy to be understood.

He didn’t spoil it by telling poor Severus that Mum had more or less deciphered that, too. That, on his other side, she was silently plotting to get together with Narcissa and plan their wedding without their consent, under the assumption that if everything was arranged they’d have to knuckle under and in any case she’d have a year or so to wear them down while said arrangements were in progress.

It was just a guess, but he was sure it was a good guess. Evan was a Slytherin. He could feel a plotting silence when it was frothing merrily along next to him.

Getting it done themselves quietly enough to satisfy Spike’s privacy-fetish and paranoia was not going to be a problem, or not much of one. Certainly not as much as Spike thought it was, unless Spike decided they had to be limited by Spike’s salary. Surely, though, even Spike would have to admit that there were such things as wedding presents, and if a fellow wanted to give his bloke one—or give himself one, for that matter—in the form of _making sure the bloody handfasting happened,_ that was definitely not charity or inequality or anything to squall over. Surely even Spike would understand that, or could be made to understand that not digging his heels in on the matter would be a _really excellent_ present for Evan. Even better than, say, feathers or shiverstones charmed so Evan wouldn’t know what Spike was going to do with them next but still had his hearing and could be talked to.

(Which was setting the bar high, because apparently getting anything to obey more than one, singular, very simple, set, unwanded, nonvocal command was over Spike’s head, at least in Spike’s opinion. Evan had vocally disbelieved him on this point once, and been treated to a fifteen minute (slightly hysterical) lecture on the inevitability of at least some unfulfilled potential in subjects C through double-Zed when one sets out to _actually master_ subjects A and B. Severus had ended on a sullen, “And it was Evans who had an instinct for Charms theory, not me, I just know enough Latin and arithmancy to improvise,” and skulked off to mopily peel mandrakes.)

Ducking the women who felt things should be done in a certain way and that something was Really Wrong with Severus and Evan for not wanting to celebrate expansively and were going to be incredibly hurt if they found out they hadn’t been included was going to be a problem, but manageable.. Keeping them from enacting their own plans was going to be THE PROBLEM.

Ev didn’t want to think about that, and he didn’t want to think about what Dad was off doing (which, he knew, was at least half of what Spike would be worrying over as soon as his brain remembered whose skull it was in). He wanted to think about lying on the carpet in front of the fireplace with Spike, going through the books of handfasting spells.

Actually, he wanted to do that now. It was what they had been doing, since they got back from Dartmoor, instead of—well, not quite _instead_ of their usual bedtime book, but poor Odysseus had barely gotten half a page from them before Spike had decided he was more interested in Evan’s wrists than the words between them. Evan never got tired of Spike’s teeth on the brushstroke-tiny runes of his tattoo[1], following the leaves up his arm, reverent lips pressed to the flames of the hearth near his wrist.

Sometimes it was like they were back at school studying DADA and charms again, grabbing each other’s arms in morbid fascination to ask whether the other thought anyone had ever actually _done_ that, people could be really sick sometimes, or silly, or to say doesn’t this sound like something so-and-so would like, oh, no, look at this one, do you see how that could turn bad?

Then, sometimes, Spike would go very still next to him, and hunch over the book and read the same page ferociously, slowly, over and over. Very, very occasionally he would then make an entry in his notebook and Evan would have to start slipping hands under his clothes, and Spike would say, “You don’t even know what I wrote,” and Evan would say, “I don’t care, _you want it with me,_ ” and—

“Evvie?” his mother asked, in a raised eyebrows voice. “Would you mind not holding my arm quite so tightly, dear?”

“Sorry, Mum.”

Spike’s thumb moved over the back of his wrist. He smiled.

Evidently deciding not to risk that happening again, Ev’s mum started talking to him about her last trip to Italy, and some lunatic she’d met there who thought it’d be a good idea to use Wizarding portraiture techniques on sculpture.

Evan groaned, “Oh, Merlin,” and Severus chirped, “Oh, golems!”

The ensuing explanation took them a good quarter of the way around the grounds, and then Evan said, “D’you know, Mum, it’s funny you should have mentioned Italy. You’ll never guess who we ran into at the conference.”

His mother smiled, “You’re quite right, Evvie, I won’t guess that it was Alessia de Medici, because her mother wrote me all about it.”

“Bother,” Evan laughed.

“She seems to have been quite taken with your Severus,” Ev’s mum said archly, “I should snap him up at once if I were you.”

“Mum!”

“After all, the de Medicis are an excellent family, and the two of them are in the same line. They’d have so much in common. And they don’t look down so much on trade on the Continent, so long as it’s _craftsmanship._ Snap to it, Evvie!”

“What?” Severus asked blankly, still snagged on the idea of anyone being taken with him.

“Oh, she was, you know,” Evan assured him. “Flirting like mad. You flirted back, in case you were wondering.”

“What! No, I didn’t!”

“You really did,” Ev lied fondly, squeezing his arm.

“I wouldn’t even know _how,_ ” Severus declared, offended.

They both looked at him skeptically.

“I mean, if I tried on what I see other people do,” he explained, “it’d look incredibly fake. Unless, I suppose,” he added thoughtfully, “the other party involved hadn’t so much as heard me say a word before.”

“Well, _that’s_ true,” Evan winced, imagining Severus laughing archly and hitting someone lightly with a fan _à la Narcissa_ , or coming over all unctuous and flattering like Lucius and Slughorn. He couldn’t decide which image was more disturbing. No, no, yes he could.

“Severus, dear,” his mother said, in an _I am trying to be patient and do not understand why my niece has allowed to you live when you are this stupid_ tone, “all you have to do is be a little playful or display a fixed interest. Your eyes are dark enough to look permanently dilated, and that will take you the rest of the way.”

Severus’s head went forward in a disbelieving stare. “But—but you’re _supposed_ to display a fixed interest during business negotiations!” He had control of his tone, but it had all the undertones of a guilty wail. “It’s only polite!”

“Well, dear, you must have noticed that you tend to make people uncomfortable, one way or another,” she said briskly.

“Yes, but I thought that’s because I don’t waste time being nice!”

“Severus,” Evan explained, trying not to laugh at him and his loathing for being nice, “It’s because you’re brusque and say terrible things to them _while you’re looking at them with sex eyes._ Implies something rather particular, don’t you know. Not something everyone has a taste for, and those who have it—”

“I am not looking at—I’m _not!_ ”

“Well, the other way to look at it is that you’re looking at them with terror eyes, Severus,” he said reasonably. “Or drugged eyes, I s’pose. Those are the reasons people have blown pupils.”

“There are some medical conditions—”

“Either way,” he cut Spike off, “you’re giving everybody enormously mixed signals. Don’t worry about it.”

“Use it, instead,” his mum advised, her voice heavy in the dark with a catlike smile. “In all seriousness, dear, Alessia de Medici is an excellent connection, and one you should pursue. By all reports, she’s a witch of good character, well-respected in her craft for her age, and, as I said, it’s a very good family.”

“And that’s Callisto Black-Rosier saying that,” Evan reminded Spike.

“I’d never forget that,” Severus said, somehow managing to make sour sound gallant, although admittedly Evan was biased, too. “She did seem to know what she was talking about, when we spoke. I could make a point of dropping by when you do her portrait. She might like someone to talk shop with while you’re painting.”

“Good,” Ev’s mum approved. “But not enough. Evvie, you _have_ been making him write to everyone he met in Devon?”

Evan decided he would actually let his jaw drop a little, because he felt like it and he had, actually, been stupid enough that it was merited. “Merlin’s cave,” he exclaimed. “D’you know what, I actually haven’t!”

“Oh, _lord,_ ” Severus groaned in pure disgust with his future. “Really?”

“Evan Rosier, what _have_ you been thinking of,” his mother scolded.

“Er… mostly what Dad’s out with, probably, more or less,” he said, which was a lie but only mostly. He’d _mostly_ been caught up in paging through the books next to Spike, caught up in the heat of him, in the relief and the pull of knowing he was, after all, every bit as welcome as he wanted to be.

But Spike had also been fussing over the calendar and brooding at old, unmoving pictures of himself with Evans in odd moments. Reg had looked worried when he’d come to tea but hadn’t wanted to talk about why. The thing about Rabastan was awful in every way, including what he and Severus had done. Even though Evan still thought it had been their best available option, that didn’t mean it had been a good one. They’d left Rabastan his brain and his hands, after all.

And what the Dark Lord had done to him should not have been done. It had been overkill to use a pain curse when he’d already been permanently damaged, and it had been _outrageous_ to do it in front of other people. Intentionally outrageous. An example, a promise, a warning, a threat. That didn’t bode well, not at all.

Yes, Rabastan had deserved punishment, obviously, insofar as ‘deserving’ was ever the point and punishment ever did any good (Evan was still sure killing him would have done a better job of stopping him, but Spike had been right that it would have kicked over a hornets’ nest), but how lucky had everyone else been, that when the Dark Lord had been looking for someone to punish, there had been someone present who’d not only done something terrible but failed to get away with it? Would the Dark Lord have waited until someone had deserved it, to make the example he wanted, or would he just have picked the best candidate presently available?

What had he meant to accomplish by this, in the main? Evan thought he’d seemed to feel he’d gotten what he wanted from it, but Evan had roomed with Mulciber and watched Sirius and Potter go after Spike again and again and again. Not just after Spike, either, except for those last two years.

In his experience, once someone started acting the bully, started issuing threats and dealing out ‘warnings’ that were painful lessons, they never felt that once was enough. Dominance had to be asserted over and over and over (although admittedly in Spike’s case, this had been because he never agreed it had been successfully asserted even once). And once a population was identified as fair game to be dominated, no one in it was safe.

Evan knew who some Death Eaters were. More than he should have known, because he was, as Severus put it, a legacy, and one whose dad had proudly expected him to want to sneak around and find out about it all long before he should have known anything. He knew there were at least a few loose groups who tended to know about only the people in those groups.

He needed to know if they were all being treated to warnings like Rabastan. He needed to know if the Dark Lord thought something was wrong with the group Evan and his people were in, maybe something fixable, or if the Dark Lord was, whether he planned it or not, on a path to turn all of the Death Eaters into his cowering victims.

So his mind really had been quite full. Still, _forgetting to nag Severus to owl new acquaintances!_ Narcissa might have demanded he burn his school scarf for such an elementary mistake, and she would have been perfectly right.

“Do you know how many people were at that conference?” Severus demanded, aggrieved, his eyes huge with the enormity of the task.

“Cards will do, dear. They needn’t be personal. Evan will take you to Nibs at Amanuensis; she’ll take care of you.”

Severus sighed.

“I think I shall have to have a word with Horace Slughorn,” Ev’s mum reflected with a note of severity in her serene voice. “I can’t think what he was thinking of, leaving me to train up my future son-in-law myself.”

Severus opened his mouth. He was going to say, _That a scrubby, filthy half-blood mill-rat with no manners was never going to amount to anything and needed no training._ Or possibly, _I haven’t agreed to be anybody’s in-law._ Or, even worse, _Excuse ME, I am a brewer and do not need socialite training thank you so very much._

“Probably that Narcissa had it well in hand,” Evan said hastily.

“Well, there is that,” she allowed grudgingly.

“Or possibly,” Severus said, “that any time he spent with me was best spent on Potions study. Not least because I myself believed it was and am considerably more stubborn than he is.” Which was worlds better than how Evan had been afraid he’d put it.

“Were you, at eleven?” Ev’s mum laughed lightly.

“I suppose I might not have been if something we disagreed about had mattered to him,” Severus returned, “but where our lives touched, there simply wasn’t anything that he cared about as much as I did. I’ve always wondered,” he reflected, “what his snake is. Do you know, Mrs. Rosier?”

“Crotalus horridus,” she replied promptly. “I’m afraid it never made much sense to me, though.”

Evan stared. “Can’t say it does to me, either, mater. Ol’ Sluggy’s a _rattlesnake?_ ”

“Now, that is interesting,” Severus purred.

Ev grinned at him. “All right, out with it.”

“Well, of course I don’t know why they would have fixed on it when he was at school himself—good _god_ I’d love to know what he was like at school.”

“I’d put my money on insufferably, fretfully dandified.”

“And you speak as one who should know?”

“Severus! I’m not fretful.”

Severus laughed. “Well, a rattlesnake _is_ one of the sorts of snakes you’d want as Head of House, of course—not a snake to provoke into a bite. The Americans used that particular rattlesnake on a flag during their revolution, with the motto, _Don’t Tread On Me_. Muggles couldn’t cure its bite at the time. It was deadly.”

“You are more or less over if he decides you’re distasteful,” Evan agreed. “Opportunities just dry up.”

“Fortune tellers thrive because it’s easy to force an analogy when you’re looking for one,” Severus said cautiously, “but he has power enough to be called a pit viper, yes, without doubt. Don’t look smug or I’ll tread on _you_.”

“You’re not wearing shoes.”

“That’s right, you won’t be able to step on me back,” Severus agreed smugly.

“I can pinch your arm, though,” Ev suggested.

“I _am_ wearing robes.”

“So it’ll be perfectly fair.”

“Boys,” his mum sighed gently. “Severus, dear, you haven’t yet said anything to make it as interesting as all that.”

“Well, considering how large and dangerous they are—and it very much is a case of What Big Teeth You Have, Grandmother—timber rattlesnakes more or less don’t bite people; they have quite mild dispositions, as snakes go. They make a terrifying display at need, but striking is quite a last resort. As a rule, they’d rather not.”

“I hope you would have been able to tell me all this yourself when you were a prefect, Evvie,” his mother reproved him gently.

“Oh, probably,” he said carelessly, “but these days I need to think about people more in terms of their pets and what they ride—or want to be remembered as having ridden, that is. That’s the sort of zoology I need on m’mental shelves lately.” Besides, the percentage of his social and business interactions that involved Slytherins had shot down significantly since school. Half his clients hadn’t been to Hogwarts at all.

“Timber rattlesnakes can also be considered incredibly lazy,” Severus needled him, enjoying himself mightily. “Do you think it’s common to all pit vipers, Lance? In this case it’s because they have an unusually long hibernation period. But the part I thought interesting is that the species is uncommon among snakes for having been repeatedly caught engaging in sociable and familial behavior.”

“Oh, I see!” Ev’s mum smiled. “ _Precisely_ the sort of serpent to put in charge of the drakelets, then.”

“Theoretically, yes,” Severus allowed. “The laziness, I maintain, was a problem and, I’m sure, still is. Particularly, though not exclusively, in the matter of bed checks.”

“Also a blessing, though,” Evan reminded him, squeezing his arm.

“I’m quite certain I didn’t hear that,” remarked his pained mother.

“We were lucky,” Severus told Evan, warm but grim. “Or at least, I was. No, _we_ were, having each other to keep things under control in our room. I can imagine what things would have been like if other… temperaments had prevailed. Children shouldn’t have to rely on being lucky. It is, for one thing, unlikely. Remember that abysmal affair, and I use the term advisedly, with the fifth year and the first year?”

“Do I remember how I got my name and the first time we said more to each other than How Much Do You Want For Your History Notes?” Evan paraphrased, raising his eyebrows.

“That’ll be two knuts, please, I believe I have the patent out on drawling rhetorical sarcasm,” Spike informed him, struggling to keep a straight face.

Evan, rather than arguing, gave him two brief kisses, grinning.

“Next time,” Ev’s mother advised, also sounding as if she was struggling to keep a straight face, “hold out for sickles.”

“I believe I may,” Severus agreed gravely.

“Rot,” Evan scoffed. “Hold out for galleons.”

“Not,” said Severus sedately, “in front of your mother.”

“Good night, mum.”

His mother laughed but, sadly, did not let go of his arm.

“She’s not leaving, Severus,” Evan reported, drooping pathetically.

“We’re almost there, I can see the gazebo, and then we’ll go home after the midnight tea,” Severus said, still sedately. He added under his breath, so quietly even Evan could barely hear it, “Please god.”

They didn’t climb any mountains, but the gazebo capped a little hill in the middle of the grounds. It was, of course, in the center of a sea of roses, because the family (apart from Endemion Rosier, back in the 17th century, who’d taken a dislike to them or possibly had an allergy) was alternately romantic and pragmatic about the name.

Obviously everyone was going to think of roses when they heard the name Rosier, the family had been reasoning for-approximately-ever, so they might as well be good at them. It wasn’t what the family thought of as The Family Business in the way that portraiture was—not a sacred trust, nor what filled the vaults. Herbologists and florists both knew who to firecall when they wanted something special, though, and many a wedding had been held on this little hill.

Come to think of it, Evan was a bit sorry he and Spike wouldn’t have theirs here, on his family land, over the roses. But it would be impossible to do it both here and privately.

Besides, when Evan thought about it, well… this might be home, but it wasn’t the same sort of home as their flat, and frankly, the gazebo had become, over the centuries, something that belonged almost as much to the public as to the family. Lovely, of course, but it was easier than he’d first thought it would be to convince himself it was a bit impersonal.

Evan’s mum tapped the side of the gazebo twice with her wand, first giving it all a good cleaning and then turning the roof transparent.

“No stars, though,” Evan remarked. “Not much point, really.”

“A roof would still seem oppressive, somehow,” Severus agreed with Ev’s mum.

“You’re just edgy because of the weather,” suggested Evan.

“I might be a bit edgy,” Severus allowed.

“Sit down, then,” Ev’s mum directed, “and we’ll all try your bilberry wine. There is something in the air, tonight, isn’t there?”

“Not just tonight,” Severus said glumly, putting the basket down and sitting, “it’s been lead skies and heavy air ever since we got back.” He glanced at Evan, and his eyes said, _it’s as if Lestrange broke the weather._

Evan smiled back a _Not even the stiletto snake’s that good,_ and reached into the basket.

Severus had said the wine would be crisp but a little sweet (because even when he was making a berry wine Spike couldn’t bring himself to make one where the sweetness was more than a modifier), so Ev had ordered a loaf full of apples and a swirl of hazelnut paste in the dough. The bakers had looked at him funny when he’d specified paste, but Mum looked pained about bits of nut in her teeth.

Evan’s mum divided the little loaf solemnly, and Severus brought it up to his nose and inhaled. He smiled, noting, “Wisdom and beauty.”

“If you say so,” Evan smiled, as if the properties of plants weren’t nearly as important symbolically in art as they were practically in potions. “The bakers just said they’d go well with something that tasted a bit like blueberries.”

Severus’s eyes were tolerant and onto him.

Mum brought out a square of rock salt and tapped it with her wand over each piece of bread, flaking off thin, transparent slivers.

“Does it matter that it’s not from the wheat of your own land?” Severus asked.

“I shouldn’t think so,” Evan’s mother said, surprised. “It’s not really a magical ceremony, dear—not a _rite._ It’s only a holiday. Besides, we don’t grow wheat.”

Severus looked uncomfortable.

“You’re having a feeling,” Evan guessed.

“Er,” Severus admitted sheepishly.

Evan pulled him in for a long, warm kiss, holding him close. Without pulling away, he asked, “What do you want me to do?”

Looking rather as if what he wanted was to sink through the floor, Severus muttered, “Excuse us,” to Evan’s mother, and pulled Evan out of the gazebo.

If Severus had been anyone else, it might have been a romantic night stroll through a perfumed rose garden. Severus being Severus and the weather being on the teetering edge of disgusting, it felt more as if they were hunting something small, invisible, and dangerous. Severus kept pouncing on flowers, smelling them, and tugging Evan further on. Evan was vaguely worried about Spike’s feet, but he wasn’t acting like someone who was getting all scratched up, and the gathering thunder in the air was coiling deliciously at the base of Evan’s spine. Even if it was hideously muggy out and all they were hunting was a flower.

It was, in fact. Severus came quivering to a halt in front of the Vivian du Lac, the triumph of Evan’s great-aunt Erato. Ev supposed that, if he’d had the least idea Spike really was looking for a flower, he would have just taken him here in the first place. Then again, maybe the hunting was as important as the find.

The Vivian du Lac had the fullness of a peony and the delicate, glowing color of a lotus. Its sweet, slightly spicy aroma was strong enough pull a wanderer in even above the combined smells of the roses around it, and nothing said at a table where one of its roses was vased would be heard outside the room.

The thorns were something wicked.

Severus handed Evan a pair of very small copper clippers. “Three petals,” he said. “Cut where they’re still pink, don’t get the white at the base.”

“Why me?” Ev asked, eyeing the thorns. “You’ve got more practice at this sort of thing lately.”

“You’re the heir,” Severus said implacably, pressing the clippers at Evan firmly and holding his hands out, cupped, for the petals.

“I’ll stick myself,” he warned.

“Good.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Ta.”

“Just a holiday my arse, Ev. You walk the limits of your land under the cross quarter moon, which probably feeds its most ancient wards, you eat the fruit of its growth. You by-god give back. You don’t want to be a parasite to the earth that’s yours: you show respect. Not all magic is wand-waving and deformed Latin. You _know_ that.”

Evan considered. “Fair point,” he conceded, and pressed the back of his hand into the thorns by way of being proactive. Gashing one’s palm or sticking a knife into one’s thumb, he’d always thought, was stupidly dramatic. Sacrificing blood was one thing, but there was no need to make a wound where it was liable to be continually re-opened and get in the way of one’s work.

All right, so Severus could have healed it for him in about a second. Probably. Wheel of the Year days could be odd. Besides, there was the principle of the thing.

Possibly because he’d been gracious about it, the big outer-rim petals came easily and the rose didn’t take any more blood from him than he’d given while he was cutting. He didn’t see where the droplets had gone, either, despite the stem being quite green, so Severus had probably been right.

“You don’t want to put them in a vial?” Evan asked, dropping the petals into Severus’s cupped hands.

“No, I don’t think that’s right,” Severus frowned. “It shouldn’t be… it shouldn’t be lab things. A science mind isn’t right.”

“Do you get the feeling someone ought to be having sex out on the grass?” Evan asked, nudging him slyly. He wanted to smell heather and juniper and oak, not this heavily unrelenting floral blanket.

It must have been all the roses, and because Ev’s mum was too far away to hear (because Spike couldn’t have known about the discretion of the Vivian du Lac): Spike laughed. Quietly, but out loud. “Yes,” he said, “but probably your parents, not us. Or your grandfather.”

“Spike, _ugh!_ ” He complained at Spike all the way back to the gazebo, too, which Spike thoroughly deserved. Spike carried the petals carefully in his hands the whole way. There wasn’t any wind, but Ev was sure it wouldn’t have mattered.

Before they rejoined his mum, though, he asked plaintively, “Do we have to stay _all_ the time till Lammas Day, d’you think? It’s probably another hour or so till midnight, and the weather’s mucky. You were planning to go to work tomorrow, you lunatic, and I want to take you home.”

Severus looked consideringly down at the petals in his hands, and then pressed the sides of their arms together. Evan wrapped his arm around Spike’s back, which seemed to be well received. “I think staying is probably a good idea,” Severus said slowly, leaning against him. “It would be a good idea to be here when your father gets back, if possible. Good manners to keep your mother company, for one thing.”

“True,” Evan admitted. July was dying around them. If the Dark Lord had decided to give any credence at all to the idea that it was the seventh month of this year that was special, then it was for the best that he and Spike be comfortably accounted for during all of its last day.

Spike had slaved over that report that dissuaded the Dark Lord from putting any particular interpretation on the probably-a-prophecy Spike had overheard. The last thing Evan needed was for the Dark Lord to get it into his head to think that either of them were meddling in the business any more than that. Especially since, if Lily Evans-as-was got caught up in it, there was, realistically speaking, no way to stop Spike from, yes, meddling. Meddling a lot. Meddling full speed ahead, and to the best of his ability. Realistically speaking, no way at all.

Maybe she wouldn’t get caught up in it. Obviously she was going to _get in trouble,_ she couldn’t help _that_ , she was a Gryff. A very, very, Gryffish Gryff.

If she hadn’t become someone for the Dark Lord to seriously obsess about yet, though (which she hadn’t, because Dobby would have told Kreacher who would have told Spike, or at least told Reggie who would have told Spike or Evan), well, there was only about an hour and a half left in which she might ruin Evan’s life.

“Evan,” Severus said with a sudden urgency, but when Ev looked at him he saw more needy _I don’t want to go back under the stone with your mum yet_ than strategy in his eyes.

So he stroked Spike’s face down against his shoulder. “We don’t really live here, you know,” he said. “Not any of us. I used to, with Linkin, but Mum and Dad are always off. Grandpère really lives in the studio in town, although officially he lives here, too, of course.”

“Is it Linkin who keeps the gardens?”

“No, it’s my cousin Pericles. He used to throw tantrums and run out into the gardens when they tried to make him play with crayons as a kid, so they let him get on with it.”

He felt Spike smile, just a little. “Did your grandfather ever live here?

He nodded. “When my grandmother was alive, they say.”

“Ah.”

After a while, he asked, “Spike? Do you know what I’d really like?”

“To go home right now?”

He smiled. “That, too.”

“Mmmm. Astonish me.”

His smile tugged wider. “Well, there are even more grounds than roses, you know.”

“Amazingly, Ev, I did notice that. What with being barefoot while we were walking over them for two hours.”

“You didn't have to be.”

“I felt I ought to be.”

“Did you feel I ought to be?”

“Honestly, yes, but you have citified feet that haven’t gone barefoot a day in your life and I didn’t want to listen to the whinging for the rest of the week.”

“I could have done a cushioning charm.”

“That would have missed the point _even more badly than shoes._ What is it you’d really like?”

“I’d like you to start planning out the herb garden you’ll turn the rest of the grounds into when we move in someday.”

“…That’s a bit ghoulish, isn’t it?” Severus asked, but his voice was light and he was still leaning into Evan’s side.

“No,” Evan explained, “because we don’t have to wait for Mum and Dad to die for it. They’re never here, and they’ll probably want to live in Spain or somewhere else sunnier than Hampshire with better museums when they decide they’re too old to go on globetrotting. We’re only waiting until it's safe to make a public statement and it feels right to live somewhere bigger than the flat, or makes any sense at all not to live close to Diagon.”

“…Lance, you canny bastard,” Severus breathed, delighted with him. “You’re getting me _invested_ in it. You want me impatient! I will not be bribed out of all common sense with a potions garden, vartlet!”

“Not even the dream of one?” Evan cajoled. “One someone else will look after and you can design yourself?”

“Evil!” Severus shouted dramatically, reeling horror-stuck away from him. “Back, foul tempter! I shall resist your wiles! Get thee behind me—wait, no, that’s the _least_ safe place for you, get away!”

He dashed up the last few steps up the hill. Hiding behind Evan’s astonished mother, he pulled a horrible _nyah_ face as Evan loped up in his wake. Amazingly, the rose petals were still cupped in his hands, and Evan had definitely not seen, heard, or felt a whiff of a sticking spell. He must have been something to see at village egg races, if they’d had those back at his smelly brown depression of a neighborhood when he was growing up.

“If you boys are quite finished,” she quenched them. Because she was not Narcissa, even if sometimes Severus forgot she wasn’t.

It wasn’t entirely Severus’s fault. Narcissa looked far more like her than Evan did. Evan had his dad’s solidly-boned wedge of a face; the only delicate Black feature he had was his nose, and nothing showed Narcissa’s Rosier blood but hair. Worse, Callisto Black-Rosier and Drusilla Rosier-Black had mutually decided that Narcissa was the last hope of both their families for a respectable public face. She’d therefore ended up with extensive coaching from both of them, and picked up no few of both of their mannerisms.

Picked up might have been something of a euphemism. ‘Had crammed in’ would possibly have been more correct. Evan was (mostly) glad his mother hadn’t taken that kind of time to force _him_ to be exactly what she thought her heir should look like.

But then, as far as he understood the weird way that Black witches thought, he wasn’t her heir, just his father’s. Narcissa really was her heir, since Reggie was weak and Sirius and Bella were impossible and Andi, despite being of good material, had decided to take herself out of the equation. All the griping about Slughorn meant that she was considering that Severus might, in some small way, eventually take on part of that role, but it would always be mostly Narcissa.

What Narcissa was heir _to_ , Evan wasn’t entirely sure. Just a sense of responsibility, maybe, or a feeling of being the family’s serene, dependable, unchanging face. Which Ev’s mum hadn’t been since she became a Rosier and started gallivanting around with Ev’s dad, frankly. That didn’t matter, though; it was what _she knew she was,_ when she wasn’t thinking of herself as a Rosier and an artist. When you were in the room with her and she thought she was a Black, the cool roots of her spread down clear through the heart of the world, and you knew there was no rocking her. Narcissa wasn’t quite there yet, but her roots were spreading.

No, Ev couldn’t blame Spike for occasionally forgetting not to treat his mum like their friend. Spike could, though, and whenever he caught himself relaxing too much around her he flushed, as he was doing now.

Predictably, being embarrassed, he got all reserved. Evan sighed a little. But he did, actually enjoy storytelling-Spike and they had till midnight to get through, so why not?

“Do you know the wand-shop in Nottingham?” Spike asked Ev’s mum, settling down across from her on the stone bench. Ev sat next to him and hooked a foot around his leg, since his hands were still occupied.

“I’ve read about it in _Cognoscat Emptor,_ _but I_ haven’t been there,” she said, and patted her wand-holster. “I’ve always been quite content with my own wand. An Ollivander.” The _of course_ was silent.

“It’s worth going,” Spike told her. “The wands are nearly a hobby for the proprietor—he thinks keeping the shop open is important, a trust, like portraits, but he might sell, oh, five in a year. It’s not his livelihood.”

“What is, then?” she asked, with the patience of a women who knew when a man expected her to ask a question to move the conversation along.

Severus crinkled his eyes at her. Evan realized he’d put in the space for a question not because he expected her to be interested but to engage her in the conversation.

And all right, maybe it was a third-year tactic and he shouldn’t have thought it was worth making a ‘let’s share a joke over social tactics’ expression at Ev’s mum. And maybe Ev really, really shouldn’t have been impressed, because it was a _third-year tactic_ and he should have been doing it instinctively by now. Only, he certainly hadn’t been doing it in third year, or seventh year, and Ev wanted to take him home at once.

“He calls his shop ‘Heartwood Sweets,’ because the heart of his sweetshop is a wand store in a back room,” Severus said, “and he thinks himself terribly clever for it although I’ve attempted to disillusion him several times.”

“A friend?” she smiled.

Severus considered. “By some definitions, I suppose. He used to give me opportunities to earn book-money when I was younger, when I could get there, and we’ve had an informal sort of business relationship since then. He’ll sell my mead and things when I’ve made any, and there are certain ingredients he always wants when I can get my hands on them or make them.”

Ev’s mum’s face took on a slightly alarmed cast, although her expression didn’t change. She looked, to Ev, as though she thought the conversation was about to turn into a confession, or at least, into discussion of Dark Arts related things about which she preferred to keep a very solidly plausible deniability. “Oh, indeed,” she said vaguely, not really encouraging.

“Yes,” Spike said. He clearly knew what she thought, and his mouth had quirked up. “Mostly candied flower petals.”

She blinked.

Spike smirked his _yes, I know exactly what you were thinking smirk._ Out loud, though, he just explained, “It’s not a very common treat among muggles—more so during the nineteenth century, but not really these days, at least in this country, so there isn’t much of an industry for gathering the petals of edible flowers, let alone for the tedious business of crystalizing them. Tedious for muggles, that is, and it’s hardly something most herbologists or potions brewers would bother with. It’s convenient for him to be on good terms with a wizard who prefers to gather his own fresh ingredients and doesn’t disdain to waste perfectly good potions ingredients on confections.”

Ev’s mum smiled. “Why don’t you disdain to waste them, then?”

“Because Gowan let me buy my wand in flowers and garden wine, probably at cost,” Severus said, “and let me earn my books for school the same way, most likely taking a loss on the deals, and never let me leave his shop without ‘giving my opinion’ on a new treat he was trying out even if it wasn’t new at all. Because the money from the sweets made with the petals go to schools around the area, which certainly doesn’t help as much as I thought it would when I made him agree to it, but any help they get is help they can use. And because he agreed to it. Easily.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure he was taking a loss, Severus,” Evan said. “On the flowers, okay, but not on the mead and that. Don’t make that face at me, DF.”

“Mm-mm,” Spike hummed dubiously. “Well. This was all preamble to the following: you may believe me when I tell you that I know about eating flowers.”

“I would have just believed you,” Evan sighed, slumping forehead first onto his shoulder. “Really I would.”

“But don’t you think it was well done of Severus to bring his old mentor to the attention of a potential patroness, dear?” his mum pointed out. “A _tad_ clumsy, Severus, dear, but a sound instinct, and I shall certainly visit this Heartwood before the Samhain rush. I’ll also have a word with Narcissa about helping you with your brevity.”

“Oh, god.”

“And your exclamatories.”

“I probably shouldn’t tell her I only wanted to tell her that if she decides she likes rose petals to stay away from the red ones because they’re bitter,” Spike posited to Evan in despair.

“Should you tell her you spent five minutes Slytherining awkwardly just so you could Ravenclaw on a topic she’d have preferred you to discuss with the house elf? Maybe when you’re looking for tips. Not while she’s mildly impressed with you,” Ev confirmed, patting him.

“I have a recipe for rose soup,” Spike informed him dolefully with tragedy eyes.

Evan considered this. Spike, he decided, was just flailing, and they were lucky he’d said something slightly more relevant to the conversation than _Tawaret hippopotami would have helped Nero with the water hyacinths **[2]**_. He was trying to act normal while fretting his heart out about everything that might happen while the weather and the hidden moon were getting to him, and being threatened with post-graduate Narcissa education when he’d only just been released from body language lessons had been simply one bridge too far. Narcissa was wearing _extremely_ pointy shoes these days, after all. Extremely pointy on _both ends._ It was quite possible there was no such thing as rose soup, although you never knew. “You’re not to cut up the garden to make it.”

“ _Oh, thank god._ ”

Evan smiled and cupped his face so as to kiss its very convenient nose. “Why don’t we have that picnic we walked out here in your bare feet for, then? You look as if you could use a drink.”

“ _Yes, please._ ”

“The bread is already salted,” Evan’s mother said, so mildly that she was really saying _you know, boys, I’m right here and can hear you_ , quite loudly.

“Have a rose petal first,” Severus said, holding his hands up. “These are your land’s real first fruit.”

“How peculiar,” Ev’s mum said, when she’d eaten her petal. She didn’t seem to have liked it much.

Ev tried not to think how-unsurprising that she didn’t enjoy the family roses, because it was a thought that made him feel small and cloudy and cold. Spike was putting out heat like a teapot in the froggy air, and he was all wiry-solid and not-bruised, his long bones reassuringly tucked away in decent cloth without a patch or ragged hem in sight when Evan leaned against him, which meant Evan was a grown wizard, too. Ev took a petal from the cupped hands, idly playing the old game of name-that-potions-stain while he pressed close.

“That’s strong,” he said in surprise when he’d had his bite, not in displeasure. “Sort of… strawberries, but spicy.” Maybe there was such a thing as rose soup after all.

“If a pink rose is aromatic, it’ll be flavorful,” Severus said. “As a rule.”

“If I’d known we were going to eat them, though,” Evan said reflectively, “I might have steered you to a rose that isn’t intrinsically magical.”

“…Oh, Evvie, not the Vivian du Lac.”

Ev thought the glowing lotus-color combined with the size and lush ruffle of the petals were unusual enough that he would have recognized them without the hint, himself, but possibly he was being unfair. Except that he really had spent eleven years living here which his mother had spent living everywhere else. So even if he was being unfair, the facts were on his side.

When the rose had been explained to Severus, he looked, uncharacteristically, cheered up. Evan had been expecting him to freak out about unintended magical effects. “We ate a petal of discretion flower?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“More or less by accident?”

“I suppose you could call it a collective accident.”

“A token amount of discretion flower, bred on your land by your family, which you willingly fed with your blood?”

“What?” Ev’s mum demanded sharply.

“It was just a scratch, Mum. You know you can’t go near that thing without getting a prick.”

“And which, after you had watered it of your own will, then didn’t stick you any more with its eight hundred million hungry little barbed fuzzy stinging-nettle looking fairy tale thorns?”

“…If you want to put it that way…” Evan allowed, eyeing him in some alarm. If they were at home, he would have stuffed a piece of bread in Spike’s mouth _at once_ to stop him saying disturbing things that made Ev’s hand throb in an obviously psychosomatic sort of way, but he didn’t want his mum to think Spike was a barbaric influence on him. The thorns hadn’t been _that_ bad.

Had they?

He looked at his hand. No, there weren’t any stinging-nettle sort of hairlike thorns caught where he’d pricked it. It was just a cut, no swelling or redness, at least so far. Spike was just being disturbing for the sake of it.

Or, he realized a moment later, smiling privately, feeling guilty about having encouraged Evan to bleed by himself.

“Sounds like a good omen to me,” Spike decided with finality, and poured the wine with an air of satisfaction.

He was halfway through filling Ev’s mother’s glass when a house elf popped in, shrieked, “Master Severus, you is coming now!” and grabbed him. Severus had just enough time to let go of the bottle and dive, elf and all, to wrap his arms around Evan before they disappeared.

The last thing Evan heard, as the darkness of disapparition swirled over the gloom of the overcast night, was Severus’s ruby-red bilberry wine shattering on the edge of the grey stone table.

* * *

[1] The one on his arm. Giving particular attention to the matching tattoos on Severus’s arm and Evan’s foot was never something either of them felt much like doing at times like these. If they ever wondered how Narcissa treated Lucius’s, the fact that Narcissa would give them nothing more than an eyebrow of surprised reproach and, more, the dreadful prospect of Lucius telling them far too much kept their curiosity well in check.

[2] They’d actually been treated to this comment once, during NEWT revision when Severus had gone completely out of his mind. In his defense, he’d explained later, after Evan, Avery, and Wilkes had hauled him out of the library by both feet and his wand hand to make him play Quidditch until he stopped shrieking like a teakettle under his breath (and started screaming at the bludgers like a normal person), he _had_ been revising for his Care of Magical Creatures NEWT. And Flitwick had had the choir doing a thoroughly [hypnotic little round](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIbtgO_QpKI) that he now _could not get out of his head_ , especially when Kettleburn had them studying bloody river creatures.

As the hippopotamus comment had, in fact, been in reply to the question, “Oi, Snape, did the Tartan say you _can’t_ create gold, like food, or is it just that the goblins will eat your face,” this had not substantially helped his case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes** : This is the weather they were actually having.
> 
> I was planning a lovely, romantic Lammas night picnic for them with ironic twinkly stars, so they would relax into a false sense of whoozit and be slapped upside the head by life, but no. They had actual lowering, ominous, low-barometer, crazy-making thunderheads.
> 
> For real. In real life. I did a search and there was a thread with people complaining about do you remember how thundery and gross the last week in July 1980 was all over England.
> 
> Rock on, say I. Rock on.


	71. July 31, Earlier, Hospital Wing, Hogwarts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What is the sound of one lioness slithering? Mostly scrabbly claws, DETERMINATION, and people going, "What. Lily. I can't even. Lily. Lily. No."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** for GRYFFINDOR!

"I _beg_ your pardon he's bringing you pickles and ice cream but I don't get my curry!" Alice demanded hotly.

"No curry in the ward!" Lily proclaimed. James wasn't too busy being as confused as Alice to imagine her slender again in golden armor, pointing a sword in fierce defiance while the banner of her oak-red hair snapped behind her in an obliging wind.

"We had curry all last week!" accused Alice. "You said it was a Placebo Potion!"

"Well, we're not having any this week," Lily said firmly.

"Dobby is only too _happy_ to bring Alice Long—" the elf began anxiously.

"Shut up," James advised him companionably, "if you value your life."

Dobby looked up at him in confusion. James thought it was probably because he was used to death threats that were actual death threats, not friendly warnings.

"You don't want to be in the middle of that," he therefore explained. "You just let them tell you what they've decided when they finish, yeah? Best all 'round."

"But," Dobby wailed, "Dobby is _happy_ to be bringing Alice Longbottom her curry!"

"Fine," James told him. "Do it when you're told to." Years of managing Pete's nerves kept him from rolling his eyes, but he was seriously tempted.

"Dobby is bad, bad!" the elf concluded, devastated, and started looking around for something he hadn't yet been explicitly ordered not to hit himself with.

"Stop it," James ordered wearily, without looking. When the elf's sniffles had gotten to him, he gave in and asked, "Why, exactly, have you decided you're bad now?"

"Other elves is anticipating their masters' every whim!" Dobby told him in a voice that sounded like _Dobby's beloved siblings has died in a blaze of Fiendfyre, leaving Dobby with all their responsibilities._ "Dobby is trying very hard, James Potter, but Dobby is always getting it wrong!"

"Black—I mean, Mrs. Malfoy sent you here to work on the being-incredibly-clumsy thing, didn't she?" James reminded him. "Maybe you should focus on that first."

Remus would have said this was harsh and Lily would have agreed a week ago. That, however, had been before Dobby, trying to help the mediwitches, had floated a rack of potions across the room _far_ too quickly and given Lily a goose-egg. James was still convinced she'd been concussed and they'd been too afraid to tell him. Either way, the elf needed something to do that wouldn't leave the Hospital Wing in ruins.

"Here," he went on, summoning Madam Pomfrey's copy of _Aromatic Poultices for Putrid Adolescents_ off the shelf and balancing it on Dobby's little bald head. Actually, it was rather a flat head, but on the other hand, it was rather a large book. "Walk around a bit and don't drop that. No hands."

"What on earth are you two doing?" Lily asked when Dobby drew her attention by dropping the book and starting to bang his head on the floor. "Dobby, what have I told—I mean, stop banging your head on things at once and don't do it again."

"He's great practice for when the sprog's a toddler, isn't he," James mused, looking on the bright side. "Just helping him walk without tripping over himself, _fleur de mon coeur_. Keep at it, Dobby."

" _Please_ stop trying to speak French," Lily begged.

"But it's your name!" he protested, rather pleased with himself for pulling that one off. The last time he'd called her that, she'd told him he might as well ask the Giant Squid to Hogsmeade as her. And then thrown an inkpot at him when he tried to explain how much shapelier her tentacles were.

"Whatever you say, _Sirius_."

"Stopping."

" _Thank_ you."

"I didn't miss all the fireworks, did I?" he begged in his turn.

"No, we're still fighting about the curry," she assured him. She should have been trying not to smile, not trying _to_ smile. And she was idly rubbing a fold of blanket between her fingers, although she wasn't ordinarily much of a fidgeter.

"If she'd just give me a reason," Alice complained.

"I did give you a reason! It's bad luck to eat spicy food in the last week of the month. Muggle superstition. VERY BAD LUCK."

"If she'd just give me a half-credible reason," Alice complained, every repeated word in exactly the same tone as before. Her eyes were on Dobby, who was walking gingerly around the room, flailing his twiggy arms in a panicky attempt to keep his balance.

Alarmed, James demanded, "Lily, you're not having morning sickness again, are you?! Is that a bad sign?!"

He could have sworn, just for a second, that a flash of relief had turned the lush ivy green of his wife's beautiful eyes to emeralds, but it must have just been the light. "It's not _morning sickness,_ " she demurred, disgruntled at being caught out. "I'm just _sick_ of it, that's all. We've been having curry in here every night—"

"It worked for Ravi!" Alice huffed. "Her husband brought her that take-away and she went into labor _that night!"_

"Couldn't possibly have been a coincidence," James said in as Moony-like a not-arguing-with-you-just-saying tone as he could manage.

"Lily says the curry spices work almost like a potion," Alice menaced him, "and old Sluggy never shut up about how aces Lily was in Potions."

"Well, obviously, Lily's brilliant," James had to agree.

"I didn't say it would instantly induce labor, I just said it might, might, _might_ speed things up," Lily scowled at them both.

"She went into labor that night," said Alice stubbornly, "and she wouldn't share. We just have to get Dobby to find the _right_ curry."

The elf turned so fast that the book on his head spun away into the tea-trolley and nearly knocked it over. The teapot stayed more or less where it had been, but sugar lumps sprayed all over the floor and one of the cups fell down and shattered. "Dobby would be _happy—"_ he started, pathetically eager.

"Stay _out_ of it," James reminded him, a bit exasperated. Worse than Pete at his most nervous, honestly. "And clean that up."

"Clean it up, please, Dobby, but don't worry about it," Lily said, kinder, "we know it was an accident." He was going to have to explain to her at some point that _don't worry about it_ was an order to an elf, not a reassurance. "Look, can we just go _two days_ without curry? _Please?_ "

"You don't have to have any," Alice pointed out crossly.

"I have to smell it," Lily returned in kind. "I am so, so, so _sick_ of the smell of turmeric. It's not so much the curry itself, it's that _lingering flat, greasy, after-spice with old sultanas and stale beans._ "

James had managed not to ask her why she was thinking about how Snape smelled.

That had been the argument about what to have for dinner yesterday. And lunch.

They'd also had approximately that argument over both non-breakfasty meals on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. This morning, Alice had hopefully proposed curried eggs.

James was heartily sick of it, and Frank was so sick of it he could only take it once a day and had been taking dinner with his mum. James had chosen the alternate route of asking (begging) Sirius (and Remus when he wasn't doing boring on-site work for other people) to join them for lunch so they could all get some work done on Marauders Moon projects during the afternoons. Having the lads about didn't stop the conversation from starting, but it did send it off on interesting tangents wholly unrelated to whether or not spices made women go into labor and if so (bleurgh) how.

He would have liked to be having it again now, please, because Lily and Alice had both started looking uncomfortable at various points in the morning. Lily had woken up with a gasp and pretended nothing was wrong until nearly ten o'clock, while Alice had gone, "Oooh!" almost right after breakfast (she'd won the curried eggs argument) and started eagerly badgering the midwives right away.

James had let Lily get away with pretending her face wasn't twitching every twenty minutes or so because he was under strict orders not to start running around shaking people until it was happening more often than every five minutes. He'd taken her on a walk around the lake, ending up in a nostalgic trip to the Prefect's bathroom.

This had been rather against his better judgment, but the midwife had gotten completely fed up and told him to get Lily out of her ward for at least two hours. There was more or less no chance of Lily giving birth without magical help in the next two hours, Warrington had said, and either she left or Warrington would put her to sleep.

That was because as soon as Alice had started saying things like, "It's started, I know it has, you said you could speed it up once it started," Lily had started shouting things like, "Alice, _no!"_ and "Don't do it!"

" _Muggleborns,_ " James heard the midwives sighing to each other as he firmly ushered Lily out.

He didn't like agreeing when people said that, but in this case he had to. He spent most of the first hour of their walk trying to persuade Lily that midwives had been stimulating the muscles and widening the, er, bones and loosening the whatnots for centuries and it was much safer than just _letting things happen._ She'd be completely back to normal afterwards; people always were when they were fixed after hexes, weren't they? It was the opposite of a curse, it was preemptive healing, it was practically a protective charm. She'd promised him she wasn't going to just sit back and let it hurt, this was the same thing. Alice was just being sensible, he assured her.

She just nodded as if she was hardly listening and shrugged a little, gazing out over the lake listlessly with her hands protective on her swelling rosehip of a belly.

"Do you think it'll storm?" she asked him presently, when he'd fallen silent. "It's so muggy out. I hope it breaks before I really get started. This kind of weather just makes everything sweatier."

"Hey, wouldn't it be _fantastic_ if the baby was born in a lightning storm?" James asked, tightening his arm around her and grinning. "He'd never be scared of _anything_!"

"Or loud noises would frighten him forever," she retorted, sounding more like herself.

"But we could call him Thor! Not Zeus or Jove, that'd get him teased no end, but it's an excellent wizarding name, Thor. A _bit_ unusual in England, but perfectly respectable. Siri's brother had a Thor in his form. Well, Thorfinn."

"Is there suddenly something wrong with my Granddad's name?" she asked archly.

"It isn't THOR!" he insisted, and she laughed, if a bit weakly.

They let Dobby bring them lunch outside and rambled all afternoon because Lily said walking always helped with her monthly cramps and if Alice wouldn't listen to reason there was nothing she could do. James forbore to point out that no actual reason had been tried, because he had now been married for well over a year and knew better.

By the time they went in for their bath,Lily's glorious hair was all sexy and straggly with humidity, despite their cooling charm. She looked disheveled even with it pulled back out of her face, because of the way it frizzed around the edges, although their pace had been sedate and James had been a perfect gentleman.

He could really sympathize with Alice, wanting the whole pregnancy business over with as soon as possible. He didn't understand why Lily had been on team Now Now Now right up till Saturday, and had woken up bright and early Sunday morning on team No No No.

He was less of a perfect gentleman in the bath, although she wouldn't let him utterly ravish her. This, he felt, was _drastically unfair,_ as the prefects' bathroom never let girls and boys in at the same time during term, and so even as Head Boy he'd never gotten to use it to its full potential. Back then he wouldn't have fantasized ravishing a Lily who was less of a supple, flame-tipped willow wand and more of a literal fertility goddess, but that only went to show that age and experience really did make a bloke wiser. He tried, "Come on, Lily, might get it started."

She said, "Exactly."

James really didn't understand team No No No. It wasn't as if she wasn't still complaining about her feet and back.

At least she did let him relax her in all the less jostling ways, which was both lovely for him and left her napping with an expression that wasn't worried-sick. It was a _good_ kind of warm and humid in the bathroom, not the sticky, looming, charcoal-skied humid it was outside, and after James had been rubbing her sleeping back for a while he lay down beside her on a towel transfigured into a cushy mat and drifted off, too, idly watching the muggle's fantasy of a stained-glass mermaid swish her lovely blond hair until his eyes fell shut.

Someone snarled, " _Oxytocin!"_ It sounded like Lily, only furious and bitter in realization, and he hadn't heard her sound anything like that in years.

James's eyes flew open. "What?"

"What?" Lily asked in a sleepy voice. He thought for a moment her back was tense against him, but then she was relaxed again, and she did sound sleepy.

"I thought you said… er… oxen toes? Something."

"You must have been dreaming. Cows have hooves. Go back to sleep, Jamie."

"How far apart?" he asked, although the heat and the lavender smell drifting off the water were curling around him and sending him half-asleep again already.

"It's not time yet, don't worry."

"'Lright," he mumbled. "Time is it?"

"Sevenish."

"Hungry?"

"No, I don't want to eat. Go back to sleep, Jamie."

So he did, pressing his face against her back.

When he woke again, she was doubled over… well, normally he would have said her knees. Over her middle, anyway, arms wrapped around her shins with her head on her knees. She was shuddering. "Sweetheart? You all right?"

"Mfine," she mumbled. The shudder had stopped.

"What time is it?" She shrugged, and he cast a _tempus_ charm. It was nearly ten thirty. Well, he supposed, he had been worrying; that could wear a fellow out. "How far apart?"

"James." This was not mumbled, and had some snap in it. "It isn't time yet. This is my first baby. First babies usually take twelve to twenty-four hours."

The thing was, James had woken up muzzy when the snarl had done it, but he felt quite refreshed and awake now. More than awake enough to realize what was wrong here. "That's the second time you haven't answered that question," he said, his voice hardening as he pushed himself to a sitting position. "And, as a matter of fact, Lily, it's _been_ twelve hours. More like sixteen, actually, by my count."

"It's just two more hours," she said, more to herself than to him and sounding desperate, in a refusing-to-sound-anything-but-resolute sort of way. "I can last two hours. My water hasn't even broken."

"They _said_ it doesn't always! Lily! What is _so important_ about two hours?"

"It just is!" She swallowed and shuddered. Not with emotion. She stopped almost at once with him watching, but stayed clenched stiff until the little numbers of the tempus charm had ticked over into 10:28.

"Right," he said, standing up. "I can see you're not going to tell me or be reasonable, and I'm not going to drag you like a cavemuggle, so let's skip the argument. Come back to the hospital wing on your own feet or I'm going to float you. I'd rather you didn't make me, Lily, but don't think I won't."

Her head snapped up, eyes blazing like floo fire, and it was just like being back in fifth year again, except that the untouchable goddess of golden righteousness probably would actually have forgiven him by tomorrow, when she felt better. Which was actually really good to know, although he wouldn't have been so sure of that back in fifth year when the chase was his bread and wine.

She unwound to her feet (a little unsteadily, due to her haste and the taut midsection which was apparently straining to be free, whether she wanted to admit it or not) and planted her hands on her hips, still blazing. He spent the Moment Before admiring the rise of her also-swollen bosom as she sucked in a breath, and then…

"JAMES POTTER, YOU BULLYING TOERAG! HOW DARE YOU, YOU— _PUT ME DOWN,_ YOU _ARROGANT, PATRONIZING, SELF-OPINIONATED—!"_

Ah, his glorious Lily. What would he do when she made him deaf? Well, there was always the sonorus charm.

"They told me not to argue with the pregnant witch," he mused aloud, "but I do just have to say that 'self-opinionated' is a bit rich coming from someone who's so sure she's right she's willing to risk going into full labor without anybody to help her at all—because Merlin knows I wouldn't know what to do, Lily, except get out of the way and possibly boil water—and flat-out refuses to tell anybody why."

"Dumbledore knows," she said sulkily, in an acknowledging-his-point tone, as he carefully maneuvered her through a doorway. She clung to it, but he tugged her away. "And you're still an arrogant, bullying toerag! How _dare_ you take away my choices! And don't you tell me you're just doing it for my own good! It's not just me, right now, you're bullying is it? _Is it?_ Did you stop for _five minutes_ or have you been laughing behind my back _right from the start?_ "

"Don't change the subject." They probably should have had the fight about Snape about two weeks ago, no matter what Sirius thought, but she'd kept her mouth closed tight and unhappy over it and he'd been afraid to push and he _wasn't_ doing it today. Today was _not about that._ "Shout at me for exercising my judgment as your medical proxy _as your husband_ in the face of your _obvious insanity_ when you don't want me to, that's fair. Swear at me for putting you through this, or just for having a todger, they told me you'd do that. But _that_ is not a talk we should be having today. Come on, you know I'm right."

"…You are right," she admitted, although there was something in her tone that made him wary. She pulled in another breath, which was also a treat while she was flat on her back in the grip of his mobilicorpus. James would have opened her robes right there in the middle of the deserted corridor if they hadn't had a ticking clock goading them. Well, goading him, since she was doing her best to ignore it.

"But speaking of 'a bit rich,' you toffee-nosed, inbred wanker," she continued, which would not have stopped him if she wasn't breathless and choked as well as indignant and hadn't gone all stiff with pain again, "it is positively charming of you to assume my reasons are insane just because I'm not sharing them with you! I even told you Dumbledore knows! What, my mind's gone all weak and woozy just because I'm pregnant, is that it?"

"Well, _I_ don't know how all those hormone things work, and they said it might make you moody and that. Besides, I'm not assuming it's from that sort of thing at all. Dobby clocked you with that rack of potions before; I still think that was a worse knock than they said. Or he might have knocked something over into your tea."

"Dobby is being very, very careful!" the elf wrung its hands anxiously, because they had, thank Merlin, arrived. It was a bit hard to hear him over Lily's incoherent trumpeting-elephant rage noise, though. Padfoot said his mother could out-shout anybody and Gid and Fab kept saying _you've never heard our Molly in a temper_ , but James would put his galleons on his lady-fair's lovely and capacious lungs every time.

"Mrs. Obstinate," he announced to the midwives, trying to tug Lily through the last doorway (with his wand, because he didn't trust her not to scratch his eyes out right through his specs if he came close) "has been doing this with every doorway on the way from the Prefects' Bathroom and I'd be obliged if you'd check her hands to see if she's got any skin left. She's also having quite long contractions quite close together now."

"Jamie, you _rat,_ " Lily snarled.

"Only she doesn't want to be," he conceded. She wouldn't have said that if she was less worked up, of course. She'd feel badly about it later if she remembered, but Pete wasn't around to be hurt, so no harm done. "How's Alice?"

"Just fine," Madam Nettley assured him while Madam Warrington argued Lily into bed. "No problems. She said she wanted to tell you two about the result herself, though, since Mrs. Potter had been such a doomsayer. 'Rub it in Lily's face,' I think she said."

"Delightful girl, our Alice," James said absently, watching Lily and wishing he had his old snitch to play with because he needed something to do with his hands. Rather badly, actually. Lily was so upset she'd fallen into full-out top-speed Liverpudlian and he could barely understand one word in ten. "All heart."

"Will you two come over here and help me convince her to let us help her along?" Madam Warrington demanded, exasperated.

"I tried," James told her. "She says she doesn't want the baby born yet."

"I don't," Lily said, and it wasn't just her stubborn look. If James had imagined her with a sword earlier, now he saw her a standard-bearer. Her face was so white the freckles stood out against it like birds crossing the sun, her jaw as set as Hogwarts. He could see there was nothing they could say to move her. She'd stand fast against anything. It didn't make any _sense._ "I _won't._ "

The midwives didn't know her so well, and they tried for over half an hour while the contractions got worse and worse. Tried considerably more urgently after her water broke.

She wouldn't let anyone touch her, or touch their wands, and finally she cried, "Get away from me! I don't want any of you!"

The witches looked at each other, biting their lips, and Madam Warrington asked, "Do you want us to firecall Madam Pomfrey? Is your mother on the floo network?"

"No," she moaned, and she really was crying now, curled over her belly. "Sev, I want Sev."

James surged forward. "Lily, _no!_ Dobby, don't— _"_

She was faster. "Dobby! You bring me Severus Snape _right now!_ "

"No!" James shouted again, but the elf was already gone.


	72. Still the Hospital Wing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Potter vs Snape, round 993,234,546,878. Snape vs Potter, round 1.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : Emotional rollercoasters with embarrassing biologically icky bits. Proto-Professor Snape (is in the building!). Tiny hats. Loud noises. Dubcon potions-administration (x1). More Slytherin than you can swing a big cat at. We are fifteen minutes to midnight on July 31 and Lily is still pregnant.
> 
> ...Well... she's trying?
> 
>  **Plausibility Notes** : I was both and astonished and disturbed to discover that this chapter turns out to be medically plausible even for muggles. Although, of course, even less advisable. _Moms, do not try this at home. Not even if there is a prophecy hanging over your head. Just do not do it. No._
> 
>  **Timing Notes** :  
> The week before this was posted, the US supreme court ruled in favor of gender equality in marriage, race equality in housing, and in confirmation of the Affordable Care Act.
> 
> Also, I'm sorry for posting late. I had RL problems and my fantastic beta psyche_girl experienced technical difficulties and it also seemed silly to post this particular chapter not in Harry's birth month, given the option. :p
> 
>  **YOU DID IT!** 100 kudos and over 5000 hits, guys, THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! It's like hot chocolate with triple sec, and I've had a _miserable_ month and this was such a fantastic gift, hitting those milestones. And you know what, if any of you cheated and erased your cookies or whathaveyou to try and make sure to get bonus work out of me, THAT'S EVEN MORE AWESOME: SLYTHERIN READERSHIP FTW!!!!! :D By which I mean, I appreciate your strong statement of support. ^.^
> 
> SO. For definite, next week I'll be posting a one-shot prequel to Valley, entitled _River of the Water of Life_. You have till then to look that up with your mad Slytherclaw googling skillz and get a clue about what kind of piece it's likely to be. ;) For the second bonus, psyche_girl and I are starting a process of polishing up the early chapters in this story. I hope they'll be ready to post along with the new chapter (which, reminder, will be in a new post) in two weeks.
> 
> ...But I have to move at the end of this month, so if I'm late with either the reposts or the new chapter, that's why, and I can only beg your indulgence. I don't expect to be, but ynk.
> 
> —ETA: since the story's about to split posts, there's going to have to be some summary rejiggering. If anyone wants to throw suggestions onto the sounding board... I will end up using whatever strange combination of phrases seems most fun to me. :D

“WHAT THE BLOODY, BLEEDING, REEKING HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?” Snape howled after one wild look around the ward.  The fop he’d come in with and had in a death-grip winced and tried to shuffle behind him, because Snape was bawling very nearly into his ear.  Dobby had already backed away.  Far, far away.  “I AM NOT A FUCKING OBSTETRICIAN!  BREWER!  I DO POTIONS!  I AM NOT A MIDWIFE!  YOU CAN’T KEEP SODDING KIDNAPPING ME WITH ELVES TO DO MIDWIFE WORK BECAUSE I AM _NOT A GODDAMNED MIDWIFE_ _AND_ _KIDNAPPING IS ILLEGAL!”_

If he’d been in on this, James had to admit, he was a much better actor than James or even Sirius had ever given him credit for.   There were whites all around his creepy eyes, like a panicking horse.

So that made him feel better.  What made him feel worse was that Lily had stopped crying and was even, in a  watery-eyed sort of way, giggling a little.  And then feeling worse because of _that_ made him feel _worse than that._

“Well, you kidnapped me,” Madam Warrington pointed out, sounding perfectly reasonable and as though the entire situation hadn’t lost its collective mind.

“ _Narcissa_ kidnapped you!  And me!  Both of us, she kidnapped both of us, I just fended the stupid portkey off till—NOT RELEVANT AT THIS JUNCTURE.”

“Spike,” Rosier murmured plaintively, “my _ears._ ”

“Yes, but,” Snape said, just as plaintively, as though ‘but’ were an entire sentence full of nouns and verbs and things.  He removed his clutching spider-talons from Rosier and made an expressive, explosive gesture.  It was just one sharp movement, but it suggested a lot of flailing hand-flapping and a lot more swearing than that.

“Besides,” Madam Warrington continued, “it wasn’t my idea.  Mrs. Potter said she didn’t want us, she wanted you.  She’s being,” she finished in dire tones, “difficult.”

“Well, I assumed it was Lily,” Snape said, shooting Lily a grumbly glare that was more than half ill-concealed worry as he folded his arms.  He and Rosier were both wearing formal dress robes, Snape’s rather plainer, and for once he looked as if he’d washed.

At least, James noticed on a double-take, he looked as if he’d washed everything but his feet.  Those were bare, and very dirty: mud and dust and grass-stains and everything.  Rosier was wearing shoes.  Wastefully nice ones, of course; looked like tebo suede.  Nothing was out of place about him except that he was holding a chunk of bread.

Seeing James looking, he took a bite out of it and swallowed, giving James a placid smile.   Then he tapped Snape on the arm.  Looking deeply stressed, Snape stopped trying to have an argument with Lily via glare and turned to him with a why-are-you-distracting-me face.  Rosier ripped off a little piece of bread and pushed it at Snape with one of his sleepy log-in-a-lake looks.  Snape’s face relaxed, just a little, and he ate the bread.  

“Right,” Rosier said.  “That’s all the important bits, I think.   _Now_ will you put your shoes back on?”

For just a flicker of a second, James thought he’d caught Snape looking embarrassed.  Then it was just a pratfully magnanimous, “Certainly,” and Snape had wand-cleaned his feet and sat down to pull on a pair of socks and knee-high boots he’d apparently had _up his sleeve._ Weirdo.  “Right,” he said, standing up, and started moving to Lily.

James got in front of him.  He didn’t exactly mean to, although he wasn’t sorry for it, either.  It was something he couldn’t ever not have done.  He didn’t have to think about it, couldn’t have thought about not doing it.  There was no way Snivellus was going over there.  None.

“I take it you didn’t have a reasoned discussion culminating in a civilized compromise before you sent the elf,” Snape said to Lily, drily, over James’s shoulder.

“I knew he wouldn’t listen,” Lily said, doubled over and panting through a spasm.  Nettley had stopped trying to get her to do the breathing thing.  “Nobody’s listening to me.”

“Lily,” James said through his teeth, “has not been making good decisions today.”

Snape looked at him.  James didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t for Snivellus to look at him like a mediwizard would have, with listening eyes that were cool but not cold, and say, “Tell me.”

Lily started to protest, and Snape said, “One at a time, our Lils.”

“That’s Mrs. Potter, to you,” James snarled.

“I’ll call her whatever makes her feel safe,” Snape said coldly.  “I don’t give a damn about what you feel, and here and now, neither do you.  Yes?”  He paused for barely long enough for James to realize he might have a point even if he was _completely abusing it,_ and went back to that mediwizard face again.  “You said she hasn’t been making good decisions.  Explain.”

“I’m not explaining anything to you!” James exclaimed.  “You said yourself you’re not a midwife!  You’re not a mediwizard at all, you just do research. _On werewolves!_  You’re just taking advantage of Lily being completely out of her mind to try to weasel back into her life.  Lily,” he swung around to appeal to his wife.  She had not been impressed with his characterization of her and was the opposite of receptive, but he tried anyway.

There was a tap on his shoulder.  He swung back around, irritated with his whole skin prickling.

It was a slap.  It covered half his face, so it was definitely a slap.  An utterly girly slap.  It had the force of a punch, though, almost that of a bludger, so there must have been some magic behind it.

Either way, it sent him reeling backwards to crash against an empty cot, sliding down to the ground.  It took him a moment to shake his head clear until he could only see one of everything, and another to find his glasses.

Snape was drinking from a vial, taking it down from his lips.  There was a moment where James’s eyes couldn’t focus on him, and then he was turning around, having a low word with Rosier as he apparently unfastened his dress robes.

“Not that I’m objecting,” Rosier asked with a perplexed, appreciative look as he waved his wand idly at Snape, “but why does this help?”

“There are never more than four maned lions in a pride,” Snape said grimly.  

Tenor.  Not baritone.

A low alto, in fact, it turned out when he turned around in his shirtsleeves.  Rosier must have been re-fitting them for him.  Figured he couldn’t do clothes-charms for himself.

“All right?” he asked, hands on his still-narrow hips as he stood over James, not quite so high as before.  He wasn’t a pretty woman by any stretch of the imagination—angular, the sort of witch Muggles drew on broomsticks against the moon. Not one of the green ones with warts and a nose and chin that bumped into each other, though, however much Padfoot would have liked that.

Looked a bit like the Tartan, actually, though McGonagall _was_ pretty when you caught her off-guard, and if you looked closely (and they’d had plenty of spare time in Transfiguration) you could tell she had something to talk about under that severe cloak-pin.

“All right?” James repeated.  He felt, if not exactly dazed, not entirely caught up.

“ _All right,_ ” Snape repeated.  There was something different about him now, not just the way he looked.  It was as if he had roots spreading down through the castle stones, into the earth, and he was only being impatiently polite, he didn’t need to deal with James at all, because James could batter and bash against him forever and he’d never notice. “I don’t want to bed your wife.  I never did.   _I’m her_ _friend._  Whatever you do, whatever she says.  Even if I did want to bed her, this is the least sexually appealing she’s ever going to be in her life, so helping her now would likely completely cure me of desire.”

Off to the side, Lily made an indignant noise.  Behind Snape, Rosier choked and tried to stifle what was obviously a laugh by stuffing the rest of his bread into his mouth.  

“She’s in pain, she won’t have other people’s help,” Snape went on implacably, “and she’ll accept mine.  I’ll do everything I can for her, including asking for help,” he nodded respectfully to Madam Warrington, “when I need it.”  He leaned forward a little, eyes boring into James’s.  “ _Are you going to get in my way?”_

“He’s not,” Lily said, bent over and sweating, her voice strained.

But Snape held up a hand to her, his eyes still holding James’s.

James’s jaw worked, and set.  “The midwives stay,” he threatened.

“Damn _right_ they do,” Snape agreed fervently, spinning on his heel.  He was already gathering his hair back into a stubby club.  “Evan, get him out of here.”

“Not a _chance._ ” James scrambled to his feet, holding his wand on his cousin.

Rosier looked at him critically and called, “Probably not, Spike.  You wouldn’t pry me out with a brace of dragons.”

Snape paused and shot him a revolted look.  “Premise to remain untested.  Scenario _o_ _ff the table._ ”

“Oh, absolutely,” Rosier shrugged, seeming to understand this complete non-sequitur,  “clear out of the dining room, but, you know, for anything else, too.”

“Somebody put up some privacy screens, then.”

“Don’t you put up that buzzy spell!” James warned him.  “If I can’t hear you, I’m coming back there!”

“ _Fine,_ ” Snape huffed, exasperated.  “On your head be it when she starts screaming and cursing you with curses that’ll take and you bite through your lip. Madam Warrington, if you would?”

“Sev,” Lily started fretfully.

Snape’s voice went gentle as Warrington drew Madam Pomfrey’s familiar curtains around the three of them.  It made James want to throw up to hear that as they went out of sight, even in alto.  “Lily, she might know better sterilizing charms.  And there’s no reason not to let her, er, clean you out, or give you a pain charm.”

“…There isn’t?”

“An absence of pain in the urge to push might help you resist it.”

“Well, _sod._ ”

“Why does he sound like he knows what’s going on?” James asked Rosier suspiciously, although he did have to smile to hear Lily sound almost normally cross, and was nearly melted in relief that she was going to take a pain charm.  “I didn’t tell him what she’s been on about.  Nobody told him.  I’ve been right here and nobody told him anything..”

“That’s Severus,” Rosier said comfortably, making himself comfortable in one of the couches that had been brought in when the midwives had converted the Hospital Wing.  Very comfortable.  He looked as if he might drop off any moment.  It was late, of course, but then, Rosier just generally looked like that.  “He’s quick.  What _is_ going on, by the bye?”

“Oh, Lily’s gone mad,” James said irritably, and raised his voice.  “Snape, exactly why in Merlin’s voluminous loincloth do you think Lily doesn’t want to push?  You’re _supposed_ to push when you give birth, _I_ always heard.”

“Because she’s muggle-raised and a Gryffindor,” Snape called from behind the curtain in the you’re-being-stupid tone that always made James feel fully justified in hitting him.

“Would you care to explain that?” he asked, not least because he thought he heard Lily say, “Huh?”

Snape sighed, aggravated.  “Everyone has superstitions, Potter,” he said in the same tone, only more impatient.  “Muggles believe children born in July will be ‘fat and constant,’ and ones born in August will be ambitious and brave.[1]  Also, if you ask any muggle what the best day of the week is, there’s not a one won’t come back at you with ‘Thank God It’s Friday.’ This is the last night before August, and a Thursday.  It’s hardly surprising Lily might try to game the infant’s horoscope a little, when it’s this close to the line.”

Although, again, he wasn’t quite sure, James could have sworn he heard Lily murmur, “Nice one, swotface.”  He then definitely heard her cry, “Ooh!”

“Feel better?” Madam Warrington asked sympathetically.

“Don’t tell me, I know,” Lily sighed, sounding droopy with relief.  “You could have done that an hour ago.  Can I have a refresher, too?  Oooooh, thank yoooou…”

“Now, will you _please_ let me stretch you out a bit?  Superstitions are all well and good, but you could do yourself a damage.”

“No,” Lily said sharply.  “Sev, if she’s going to keep on about it, make her go away.”

“I think you had better step out,” Snape said to Madam Warrington seriously.  “Better that than letting her get hysterical.”

“You’ll call me back when it’s beyond what you can manage?  Books only take you so far in this sort of thing, Snape.”

“Naturally.”

“Was that naturally he’ll call her back, or naturally books only take you so far?” James asked Rosier uneasily.  Rosier shrugged unconcernedly.  While James had been staring holes in the curtain, he’d located a pad of paper and quill from somewhere, and was busy sketching James.  “Oi!”

“What?” Rosier blinked.  “She’ll want it, after.”

James eyed him suspiciously.

Rosier gave him a look that first suspected him of being a paranoid lunatic and then turned sympathetic.  He put down his sketchbook and rooted around in his robes, coming out with a ridiculously over-decorated flask.  “Have a belt, coz,” he suggested, not unkindly, and had a sip himself.  He might have been off in the clouds half the time but apparently he wasn’t stupid enough to think any Gryffindor would just go ahead and drink from an unknown flask from even a pretty-much-nominal Slytherin like him.

“What is it?” James asked, still mostly suspicious.

Rosier frowned, and gave a sheepish little shrug.  “Er… we used to call it That White Stuff With The Silver Vapor.”  James had used to think he sounded like he was yawning whenever he talked because prefect meetings had been extremely boring, but no, apparently he just talked that way.  “Tastes a bit like lemons and vanilla.”

James gave it a try.  It wasn’t bad.  “Not very strong, is it?” he asked, taking another drink before handing it back.

“I was at Lammas Eve Tea with m’mater in the rose garden,” Rosier told him in languid amused-offense, pulling out his sketchbook again. “Was I going to bring firewhiskey?”

“Fair enough,” James agreed.  He sighed, and let Rosier sketch while they waited and Lily made undignified, uncomfortable noises that were worlds better than the ones she’d made before the pain charm.  It helped a lot to know she’d let them give it to her, really calmed him down.

Snape talked to her, and though he was too quiet for James to catch much, he could tell the tone was light.  Once he crept up to listen, but Snape was saying, “They also keep a hornéd cow, as proud as any queen; but music turns her head like ale, and makes her wave her tufted tail and dance upon the green.”[2]

Which didn’t sound remotely like any rune-poem James had ever heard, so he shrugged, resolved to ask Lily and Remus later (and separately), and went back to his seat.

Then all their gazes jerked to the window: the first lash of rain had dashed itself against the glass, hard as hail.  “That’ll please the roses,” Rosier said absently as the thunder cracked.

“Lily hoped the storm would break soon,” James said, just as absently.

But Lily yelled, “NO!”

James had started to his feet and taken a full step forward in the instant before Snape’s grim voice said, “On it.”

“Lily?” James called.

“Keep out, James,” she panted, and her voice was a low menace.

“I told you she’d shout,” Snape called.

“We all told you she’d shout, luv,” Madam Nettley reminded him.

“What time is it?” Lily demanded, strained.

“Seven to midnight,” Rosier said.

James glared at him.  “Aren’t you a Slytherin?”

“And I know when truth serves someone best,” Rosier said, raising half an eyelid at James, and for just a moment he didn’t look sleepy at all.

“I can last ten minutes,” gritted Lily.

“Er… I’m not sure you can, actually,” said Snape, and James jumped up again.  It wasn’t just what he’d said: he sounded _uncertain._  He never sounded uncertain, not even when he was telling the Tartan he had no idea where to start.

“I BLOODY CAN,” Lily shouted.

“Yeah, okay, but Lils, I can see—”

“KEEP IT IN.”

“I’ll hurt you!”  

James took a step forward, but now he was uncertain, too.  That was not what he wanted to hear, but it was clear even to him that it was a protest, not a threat, and that Snape was going to do exactly what Lily told him to.  Only, she’d been making _horrible decisions all day..._

“Sev Snape,” Lily hissed, “I don’t need someone to hold my hand, I need _my best friend._ The one who _I know who you are. You’ll do what I need.”_

There was a pause, and then Snape sounded cool and quite like himself again, except for the alto.  “Then let go of me and lie down so I can do it.”

“Use magic if you have to,” Lily said, sounding mollified.

“What the _bloody hell_ kind of magic do you think I’m going to risk half a millimeter from a fetus’s fontanelles?!  You think I’m even using _fingertips?_  Your excrescence of a husband’s right, woman, you _are_ out of your mind!”

“I don’t know, muscle relaxers up here?”

“ _Out of your mind.”_

“You’ll think of something.”  James couldn’t be jealous of the confidence in that, because she wasn’t saying it in trust.  It was nothing but a commandment.  It should have been written in stone.

“This is the most unnatural thing anyone has ever done; I am convinced of it;” Snape said conversationally, not long after, while James tried to stare holes through the curtains, “and also completely foul, and you owe me _forever_.”

“It’s the most _interesting_ thing you’ve ever done and you’re already planning the article in your head so I don’t owe you a thing,” Lily retorted breathlessly.  “Oh, god— _press!”_

“You press!” James shouted, his fists clenched.

“NO!”

That went on forever, James thought, but it wasn’t long enough for Lily.  Finally, panicking, she screamed, “Push it back!  Push it back!”

“Lily.” All through school, James would have done nearly anything to leave Snape’s sounding that beaten.  He sounded like a dead thing, hollow.  “The head’s out. I can’t push it back.  It’ll break something.  It’ll _drown._ ”

Lily sobbed, one broken breath, and Snape called, “Warrington, quick.”

“He looks just fine,,” she called out reassuringly, moments later, over a siren wail that had James collapsing back onto the couch with wobbly legs, and then had to stop and repeat herself when midnight had finished tolling.  “Mrs. Potter’s a bit torn up, no surprise there,” she went on in a disapproving tone, “but we can take care of that no trouble once the placenta’s out.”

James wasn’t really listening to her, though, because he could hear Lily crying quietly in the tent.  There was a ragged edge to it.  Snape, sounding bizarrely as flustered as any normal person faced with a crying girl, was saying, “Don’t do that, you’ll give him a complex.”

That got half a laugh out of her, but she didn’t stop crying.  “Give him to me.”

“He’s got to be cleaned and all.”

_“Give him to me!”_

“ _Stop_ that, the last thing you need is a panic attack.  Here.”

There was a sniffly pause.

“For pity’s sake,” Snape said in an eye-rolling tone, “I make it for _my_ emergencies, it’s just calming.  It’s not like drugs, I wouldn’t take something that would make my mind fuzzy.”

“I’m going in,” James announced, though it was clearly too late.  Lily, more collected, was remarking with droll surprise on Snape bothering to invent a potion that tasted nice, and Snape was defending himself on the grounds of having been young and frivolous at the time and anyway sometimes they just turned out like that.

“It will be just the peace-making one he takes when he has nightmares about you,” Rosier assured him absently without looking from his sketchpad, eyes at lazy half-mast.  “He’s all milady-fair about her when they’re not squabbling like sibs.  Bit tedious, really.”

James eyed him dubiously (there was something _wrong_ there, maybe he’d work it out later), and tried again.  “Can I go in?” he asked the midwife, nearly pleading.

“No, luv, it’ll be a mess in there for a while yet,” Nettley told him over the low growl of another roll of thunder, and then asked the curtains, “Shall _I_ come in?”

“Yes, all right,” Lily said.  “Sev, you don’t have to stay.”

“Lily—”

Her voice was quivery, sounding like a brave smile.  “No one could have done more.  No one else in the world would have been mad enough to try.”

“Not enough,” he said bitterly.

“Well, Sev,” she said, still trying for brave as the storm briefly brightened the windows, “if our best wasn’t enough, it must be fate.”

There was a pause, one of those loaded ones that usually meant Snape was trying not to yell at a teacher or a prefect.  Then he said, lightly, “Arrogant bint,” and came out from the curtains.

He was red clear to the elbows and spattered beyond them, soaked with sweat and other things.  James was halfway to drawing his wand because _all that blood_ when Snape turned him sardonically.  “See?” he said, gesturing distastefully to a gobbet of something slightly yellowish on his chest.  Well, breast, actually, but he was fairly flat, at least with that waistcoat on.  “Really, thoroughly, entirely the opposite of alluring.”

“If you’ve cleaned him,” Lily was saying, “I want to hold him.”

“You’ve still got some pushing to do, luv.”

“I want to hold him.”

“And we need to do a few quick tests.”

“No, don’t take him—no!”

“You’re not done anyway, really you’re not,” Madam Warrington said over the rain and the rumbling as Madam Nettley came out with _James’s baby.  In a blanket.  He had a face._

It was a sort of been-sat-on-tomato face, but still.   _A face!_

“James, Sev, you’ll stay with him for the tests!” Lily called anxiously.

“Wouldn’t miss it!” James assured her, tripping after Madam Nettley into the Pomfrey’s office.  He suddenly didn’t care whether  Snape came or not.  Warrington had said the baby looked all right, so there must be little _hands_ in there!

“Evan,” Snape was moaning pathetically, which would have been fantastic if he hadn’t been so obviously putting it on and if James had cared about him at all.   “Wand.  Hands.   _Hands._ _Wand._ _No._ ”

“I’ve got you, Spike,” Rosier assured him, amused. “Evanesco.”

“Stop that!” Madam Warrington said sharply to Lily.  “You’ll hyperventilate.  I know you know how to breathe through this.”

“Need another swig, Ev—Lily?” Rosier asked politely.

“Relax, Lily,” James called happily, “he has a _tomato-face!”_

That got them all a brief pause, but then a higher pitch of urgency.  “Bring my baby back right now, I need to see him!”

“I’ve got eyes on, Lils,” Snape said before James could explain again about the squishy-face, in the most wrung-out drone James had heard since everyone had recovered from NEWTs. James could hear his dragging footsteps getting closer.  “It’s the least necessary thing since a solid gold boot scraper, but here’s me off.”

“Brilliant!” James exclaimed as the blanket was unpeeled.  They’d warned him the baby would probably be all blotchy at first, so he didn’t worry about that.  “Lily, did you see, they’re like little _starfish!_  Er… is he supposed to have claws?”

“Long nails are normal, we’ll clip them right off,” the midwife assured him.

“ _Little starfish, Lily!”_

“So glad someone’s pleased,” Snape muttered, resting his forehead against the doorframe and giving James the stink-eye out from under the sweaty chunks of black hair that had straggled out of his tie.

“If you’ve got a sex-change potion on you I know you’ve got Pepper-Up,” James said dismissively, trying to get in little pokes at _his baby’s tiny pea-toes_ while Madam Nettley tried to do her tests around him. He might have asked why Snape _had_ had the sex-change potion, but Snape was fundamentally weird. That was probably all there was to it.  “Take it, you’ll feel better.”

“Pepper-Up at midnight, this explains so much about your marks,” Snape mumbled.

“Oh, right, midnight,” James remembered.  “Oi, Snape, look, he’s got a tiny little todger!”

There was an explosive snorting noise, and then Snape was sliding down in the doorframe, head flung back with the back of his hand grinding down into his eyes like some Victorian poet.  He started up with the kind of laughter that might have gotten hysterical fast if he hadn’t been so tired.

“What, he does,” James insisted.  “Carrot and two peas, all correct.”

“You’ll be less enamored with it when he uses you for target practice,” Snape said, sardonic but not hostile, moving his hand so he was looking at James out from under it.  “Which he will, because as I understand it, you don’t have an elf, so there is _no way on god’s green earth_ you will be escaping diaper-changing.”

“What do you know about it?” James asked because, again, he sounded as if he knew what he was talking about when as far as James knew he shouldn’t.  This time it was less suspicious than interesting, although far less interesting than the little black swirl of hair that was starting to dry.  Or the gigantic roving eyes!  Half his face, had to be! What color was that!  People said to expect blue at first, but that didn’t look like blue, what _was_ that, that was out of this world, that was what that was.

“I’m not a midwife,” Snape said, hauling himself up off the floor like an old woman—well, no, really, still like an old man, a woman wouldn’t have been that graceless about it, “but me mam is.  And Narcissa has me over to fuss over hers far more often than I have time for _don’t get any ideas, Potter._ ”

“As if I would,” James scoffed, trying to see if the baby could track his finger around Madam Nettley trying to shoo him away.  He was rather afraid Lily would get those ideas all on her own, though.  “Snape, look, he gets a _hat!_ A little pointy hat!”

“…All ready for the Sorting Feast, then.”

“No, look, it’s a little knitted orange hat!  With duckies!”

“…Duck—Did you just say _duckies?_ ” Snape asked faintly.

“Professor Dumbledore’s been making them,” Madam Nettley said.  “Aren’t they sweet?  They make a change from socks and scarves, he says.”

“The _presence_ of the ducks is not my—sweet Circe, they’re teal.  Has anyone ever evaluated that man for color-blindness?”

“Well, it’s really more peach than orange,” James said fairly, tucking the hat more securely onto his baby’s head.  Mostly, if the truth were known, so he could have an excuse to touch his little transparent ears.   _Ears!  Full of veins!  James could see all of them!_

“This is very disturbing,” Snape told Madam Nettley forlornly.  “You’d know it was if you knew him.  Will Lily disembowel me if I run away very fast, do you think?  I could grab the baby first.”

“Oh, you.  You could not,” she said tolerantly, and went on tucking the baby ( _James’s baby!  His tiny little boy!  With Lily!  Lily’s baby!_ _All waving about w_ _ith starfish and peas!)_ into a diaper.  “They get like this sometimes. It’s a good sign.”

“It’s revolting,” Snape said, but he looked tolerant and resigned when James looked up to scowl at him, not actually revolted.

“You really don’t want her?” he asked uncertainly.

“You have the thickest, numbest skull _on the planet,_ ” Snape snapped.  “I’d come back with ‘do you want Black,’ but I’ve lived in a dormitory myself so, right, let’s stay away from that one.  We were _kids_ together, you gorilla.  I met her when I was _eight_.”

“Lots of people marry their childhood sweethearts.”

“I helped her mum treat her for chicken pox,” Snape said, as though that should have clinched his argument.

James didn’t know what he was talking about.

Snape sighed.  “There are pustules.  And flaking.  And unladylike scratching.  And pink goo.”

“Yeah, well, there isn’t any of that now.”  He was still keeping half an eye on Nettley and the baby, though she’d taken him a little way off, into a corner.  Maybe she’d heard stories about him and Snape, maybe she hadn’t.  Either way, smart witch.

Snape looked at him for a long moment.  His breathing was very shallow, and James could tell more easily than usual right now.  Finally, he asked, “Do you trust her?”

“Of course I do.”

Classic scornful Sniv head-tilt, but the eyes were cool-not-cold again, evaluating him.  “Come on, Potter, let’s not play games. _Pettigrew_ wouldn’t believe anyone would go that far just to make sure a baby was born on a lucky day.”

“…Well, no,” James admitted, again letting the slur on Pete pass because Lily was more important.  “She’s had a bee in her bonnet all week.”  He narrowed his eyes at Snape.  “You know what it is, do you?”

Snape made a little motion that could have been a head-shake, could have been a shrug.  “Couldn’t say.  She certainly didn’t tell me in there.  Just what she needed.  But you don’t know why, and you’re not bothered?”

“She was crying over it.  She brought _you_ in.  To do _that._  Believe me, I’m bothered,” he said sharply.  The baby made a noise, and Nettley cooed and bounced him.

“Your voice,” Snape said softly.  And he had been speaking quietly, James realized, even when he was being snappish about it.  “You’ll frighten him.”

“I’m bothered,” James repeated, lowering his voice, too.

“But you trust her.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t.”

James glared at him, all the heat rising again.  Snape held up a hand.  “All the things you trust her for, so do I.  And all of it’s worse than useless, where I live.”

“You just mean anyone who isn’t a Slytherin’s ‘useless,’” he said hotly.

Snape smiled at him, a little pityingly.  “Potter, you _are_ the thickest skull on the planet, and she couldn’t keep a secret from you for one day, one week.”

“I _am_ her husband,” he reminded Snape, hoping he sounded effortlessly superior rather than, as he half-suspected, a bit snotty.  He’d always used to think he was doing effortlessly superior, but somehow it had only ever seemed to work on the lower forms.  “I _know_ her.”

Snape didn’t even have the grace to look as if this hurt him, the bastard, only as if James should have better taste than to mention Lily’s bad taste.  “She could have knocked you out all day, she could have sent you off on a quest for something unfindable, that’s just off the top of my head, and all she could think of to do, when she’d had at least a week to think about it, according to you, was try to keep her lip buttoned, right?  Tell me I’m wrong.”

“She was _incredible,_ ” he argued.

“I’m sure she was,” Snape agreed, readily enough.  “But she didn’t accomplish what she meant to, which was to keep it from you that she had a secret.  Maybe because she didn’t want to, really, maybe because she’s just that bad at it.  Both, of course, are more reason for you to trust her.  You’ve had no need for subtlety in your life, rabid hairballs aside.  I have.  I can’t trust her.  She’s a dragon in a china shop, and she judges, and then she shouts about it, and then she judges more if you don’t also judge.   _And_ shout.”

His mouth had gone tight and bitter as his eyes fell to his shoes.  When he looked up at James, though, he was just tired again.  “I could never want someone like that.  I’d always be braced against what they might do next, what bloody suicidal thing they’d demand from me this time, what they’d throw themselves at tomorrow.  Not pleasant.  Not tempting.   _At all._  Not relaxing, and not,” his lip curled, “ _exciting._ I will _always_ be her friend, and I also can’t trust her.”

James eyed him.  He didn’t trust Snape to be telling the truth about being a deeply boring stick-in-the-mud when he’d always spent so much time on dark arts books and was always coming up with nasty new spells to hit them with.  He really did look like he believed it himself, at least, though.  Lily and Remus _had_ always said...

Anyway, having a friend he couldn’t trust didn’t sound like something he’d put up with, himself.

Snape’s mouth curled up sardonically.  “It’s a vague word, Potter.  I mean I can’t trust her to be what I need when I need it because it’s what she wants to be and is anyway.  Not that she’s broadly untrustworthy.”

“Yeah, good luck finding that,” James drawled, because he had to admit Snape was right about the judging-and-shouting and he himself had never been able to let her in on quite _everything._  You couldn’t trust anyone with _everything._  Even Sirius had let him down sometimes.

The irony of having that thought while talking to Snape was something he thought he’d keep to himself.

“Mm,” Snape hummed noncommittally, his lids low.  “Are you finished, Nettley?  I expect Warrington’s done by now.”

“Oh—yes,” Madam Nettley said.  James didn’t know whether any stories about him and Snape had reached her or not, but she seemed appropriately relieved that they hadn’t tried to kill each other in front of the baby (who James was going to hand to Lily _himself_ or there would be hell to pay).  “I’ll be glad to go home as soon as Mrs. Potter’s settled, I don’t mind telling you,” she said chattily as they left the Pomfrey’s office.

“You won’t be going home just yet,” Snape said coolly.  “Nor you, Warrington.”

James’s step faltered.  His hand fell to his wand.  “Is that a threat, Snape?” he demanded.

Snape tossed him an utterly scornful look.  It was unusually and _unsettlingly_ effective when he was wearing a witch-face.  The Tartan had an unbeaklike normal-person nose and pretty eyes, James reminded himself.

“It doesn’t need to be a threat,” Snape said scathingly.  “Before anyone goes home, we need to floo Professor Dumbledore.  Surely you don’t object to that.”

“Just to let him know Poppy can have her ward back?  Surely that can wait until morning, let the poor man sleep,” Madam Warrington protested.  “Oh, and I’ve put your wife to sleep, poor mite,” she mentioned to James.  “Frantic, she was, and her all worn out.”

“He won’t be asleep and it can’t wait,” Snape said flatly.  He was doing that thing again where there was no gainsaying something that had obviously grown up out of the castle’s flagstones.  James glanced at the midwives.  They were looking at Snape as though he’d lost his mind.  He glanced at Rosier.   _He_ was looking at Snape as though the man was made of chocolate-flavored candyfloss and the shop window cruelly separating them was _completely unfair._

Right, then.

Snape didn’t notice.  His mouth was twisted, as if he was thinking about a private joke he didn’t think was very funny.  “He’ll want to have a word with you both.”

“What makes you think so?” James asked slowly.

“I’ve been taking some private lessons with him,” Snape said vaguely as he moved to the fireplace.  “He might have mentioned…”  He stopped short, gaze tearing over the room.  “ _Where’s the elf?”_

He was so savage about it that they started calling for Dobby right away.

“No use,” Rosier cut them off after a moment.  “If he hasn’t answered by now, he’s back with his master.”

“Black,” James said.  “I mean, Mrs. Malfoy.”

“Well, Mr. Malfoy, mostly,” Rosier said slowly.  “He was a wedding present from the head of the Black family, so he’s a bit more Lucius’s than Narcissa’s.  That’s just good manners.”  Snape gave him a bit of a skeptical look, but didn’t say anything.  “Only, Lucius has no patience for him; Narcissa just doesn’t have _much_.”

“Would Narcissa let him come back?”

“Well, not till she was _done_ with him.  She does like thorough reports.”

“Let’s pray,” Snape said grimly.  “When was the last time anyone saw him?”

No one could remember, but then Rosier said, “Hold up,” and closed his eyes.  “He was over there,” he pointed, “covering his ears and shivering while Evans was having a rough go of it.”  He opened his eyes, looking a little strained.  “I didn’t see him after Madam Warrington came out.  Sorry, Spike.”

“The midnight peal would have covered an apparition crack,” Snape said, without expression.  “Thunder is unreliable, but he’d have known when that was coming.”  Rosier’s mouth sort of shrugged, unhappily.  Snape wheeled on the nurses, the bits of hair that had escaped his hair-tie flying.  “Have you put in the paperwork yet?  For any baby born today?  The birth certificate and so on?”

“We’ve got the Longbottoms’ mostly filled out,” Madam Warrington eyed him, “but they were still arguing over the name when they left, so we haven’t filed it yet.”

“Could you re-do it if you had to?”

“Er… no.  The duplicate appears in the files at the Ministry as we’re writing; this copy’s just for St. Mungo’s.”

Snape cursed, spinning on his heel and pacing like one of those moody blokes in those books Lily liked that could go on about landscapes or bonnets for five pages.  He wheeled on them again.  “But you haven’t filled out Lily’s?”

“Have a heart, Snape,” said Madam Warrington.  “It’s past midnight.  We had hours of beautiful, peaceful, empty hospital wing to do the Longbottoms’ in.”

Snape was saying something short and sharp and satisfied when Dobby popped back in, beaming.  “Dobby is sorry, masters,” he said.  “Dobby knows masters is calling, but Dobby is with Mistress and can’t be coming.”

“Your mistress, not your master?” Snape asked, even sharper than before.

“Master isn’t home tonight,” Dobby said, taken aback, the smile dropping off his face.  James saw Snape and Rosier look at each other, but their expressions didn’t change.  Dobby is only seeing Mistress.”

“ _Just_ your mistress?   Was anyone with her?  Did you see _anyone else_ while you were gone? ”

“Mistress is paying a visit to Mistress Callisto,” Dobby said.  “Mistress Callisto is worried when Dobby is fetching Master Evan and Master Snape for Lily Potter,” he added, twisting his ear ashamedly. For some reason, Snape twitched.  “She is calling for Mistress.”

“So Narcissa and Mum,” Rosier said, his voice tight.  “Anyone else, Dobby?   _Anyone at all._ ”

Dobby hesitated.  Dubiously, he offered, “Linkin is serving tea, Master Evan.”

Snape threw up his hands in despair and started pacing again, even faster.  Rosier just closed his eyes, breathed out once, and opened them again.  “I go talk to them, Spike?  Now? If I tell him to keep mum and he’s not _asked—_ ”

“Wait,” Snape said tightly.  He turned to Dobby.  “Are you allowed to tell us what you told Narcissa and the others?” he asked in the same contained, nearly strangled voice.

“Dobby is not forbidden,” the elf confirmed.  “Dobby is telling Mistress that all the babies is born and Dobby is coming back to serve Master and Mistress again.”

“That’s all?”  Dobby nodded earnestly.  “You didn’t mention who was here?”

“Mistress is telling Dobby that Dobby is to tell her at once when all the babies are born, so Master and Mistress will know when Dobby is plaguing them again,” Dobby said, with a bit of a sly look.  “Mistress is saying if Dobby is to tell her anything else at once.”

“Oh, well done,” Rosier breathed.  The elf straightened with pride.

“Are you allowed to tell us what your Mistress told you to do and not do?” Snape asked, his voice still tight.

“Mistress is saying mothers is still needing help after they is having babies and Dobby can stay longer.  Mistress is telling Dobby not to bother Master with boring witches’ business.”

“What did Mrs. Rosier tell Linkin?” Snape asked.

“Mistress Callisto is agreeing that wizards is finding babies very dull, and then she is sending Linkin away for a nightcap so she can be sleeping because she is worrying about Master Evan.”  He looked guilty, and reached up to wring his ear.

“You were obeying orders your mistress told you to obey.  The reactions of third parties are not your responsibility,” Snape rapped out impatiently.  Dobby blinked his giant snitch-eyes, and uncertainly let his hand fall.  “What did Mrs. Rosier say while Linkin was gone?”

“She is telling Mistress that Linkin knows Master Darius is supposed to be out looking at babies tonight even if they is dull.”

Snape punched a cot, which skidded across the room.  Dobby flinched, but he didn’t start trying to hurt himself again.  James didn’t know what their problem was, but he’d never seen Sniv look more human in his life.

“But Linkin doesn’t know who was here,” Rosier said.  It sounded like his usual unhurried tone, but he’d actually gotten it out very quickly. “That’s right, Dobby, isn’t it? And you won’t tell _anyone_ anything about tonight that you haven’t told that person already without Narcissa’s permission?”

“Dobby will take his family’s secrets to the grave, Master Evan!” the elf agreed, puffing out his skinny chest importantly.

Snape stood up.  He closed his eyes and breathed, just like Rosier had but for longer.  “Right,” he said evenly.  “Fudging the date’s probably a lost cause now—trying would just scream subterfuge—but we’ll leave that decision to Dumbledore.  One of you lot will have to call him,” he said to James and the mediwitches, “in case any of his portraits are awake and feeling gossipy.”

“Er, why?” James asked.

“Keep up, Potter. All of you need to stay put till he gets here, but Rosier and I were never here at all,” Snape said, sardonic again.  “Didn’t you notice him putting the portraits to sleep?  Or at least did you notice that the most eminent healers of their respective days have been very, very quiet while we performed a _thoroughly outrageous_ medical procedure that should have had every one of them up in arms?  Anyone?  No one.  Please, Salazar, help _everybody right now._ ”

“...When was this?” James asked, staring.

“When we came in.  While Severus was shouting,” Rosier replied placidly.  He was just standing there, being placid, like a cow ruminating on a mouthful of happy grass.

“Because that’s something he _never_ does just because he feels like it.  I can’t _imagine_ why nobody noticed,” said Madam Warrington acidly.  James was really getting the sense that she and Snape had known each other for a while.

Snape looked deeply smug, but he didn’t dwell on it.  “Where Dobby ‘is bringing us’ tonight, as he’d put it, is to my parents’ house.  Dobby, will you keep an eye on my parents for me until Narcissa calls you back, when these witches don’t need you?”

“Dobby can be doing that for Mistress’s friend,” Dobby said in a dubious, resigned, oh-Merlin-I’m-going-to-get-in-trouble-voice.

“Right,” Snape said, turning back to Rosier.  “That’s where he’s taken us tonight.  I’ve asked him to keep an eye out there.”

“So you have,” Rosier agreed, giving him the sort of fondly exasperated look that non-Slytherins gave wobbly puppies who’d just fallen into their fifth mud puddle that day.  “Do you want me to turn back their clocks before you can see them?”

Snape raised his chin and ignored this, ploughing on.  “Seems me da’s fallen off the wagon recently, and now there’s been a bit of a domestic.”

“Does it seem that way?”

“It’s going to.”

“Hard on the man, when he’s pulled himself together,” Rosier noted, not seeming to care very much.  “Hoiking them into wizarding messes without asking, too.”

“As little as possible, but what other emergency worth yanking me out of your mother’s garden could there be that the Blacks wouldn’t know all about?” Snape demanded wearily.  “She’ll forgive me sooner for grabbing you, too.  You’re in no danger in a muggle house, and she won’t want to believe anyone can stand up to his own parents without help.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t being brilliant,” Rosier said mildly, with a little head-tilt that said Snape was being strange, or possibly slow.  It won him a lip-twitch that was almost like a tired smile.

“I don’t see why you lot are so fussed, Snape,” James complained as the window flashed again in the nimbus of another lightning bolt.  “Merlin’s pants, cheer up!  We just had a _baby!_ ”

“Of course you don’t see, Potter,” Snape sighed, beckoning to the house elf and pulling out his little vial again as he crossed to Rosier.  The thunder was coming closer after the lightning, now.  “ _Christ_ but I need a drink.”

* * *

[1] Encyclopedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World,  by Cora Linn Daniels and C. M. Stevans

[2] _The Man in the Moon,_ attributed to Bilbo Baggins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next** : Dumbledore debriefs. Sadly for him, he has more scruples than to keep feeding James Draught of Peace just to make this easier for himself. Or his eardrums...  
> To read on, please continue on to the next post in the arc: Valley of the Shadow, Act II.
> 
>  **Notes** : Severus had a lot of trouble finding his way through his plan without one of the 'straight-up lies' he feels he is bad at. This was one of this bits I actually struggled with a lot, because towards the end of the first draft he went, "Wait, go back, this part requires me to lie, I don't do that, we need to set it up better.' Literally the only way he could think of to get it done was to dispense with tense and use a house elf's voice. I'm not sure how much Dobby is responding to 'Mistress supports him and I know it' and how much to 'this guy helped my cousin Kreacher,' how much to The Most Authoritative Voice In The Room, and how much to a sort-of-peer who needs a hand with helping his mistress Lily, but I know Severus is exploiting the hell out of all those possibilities except the second one.
> 
> Also, Severus does not like being referred to as Master Snape. He especially hates the ways servants like house elves use the word 'master,' whether they mean it respectfully or to indicate a child of their household. He's also not entirely happy with the fact that is, technically, a Potions Master but has only so far earned that qualification according to to the British Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers, who he does not respect and thinks are more of a vaguely-professional club than anything else, and not yet according to the International Association of Master Brewers, who have more stringent standards which muggle scientists would better recognize.
> 
> There are a lot of things that I can't get into the prose because the narrating character is missing information, but Severus wanted that on the record. (g)


End file.
